Always wondered how alternative you really are? A very emo looking 18-year-old student from Hamburg, Germany, wrote the Mainstream-o-Meter (which I got from Oh Goody!); it’s an algorithm that calls up your last.fm account and returns with your place on the bell curve of musical mainstreamness.

It compares the listener count of your top 15 artists to the average listener count of the five bands who have the most listeners among last.fm-users. So it’s mainstream last.fm rather than ‘truly’ mainstream, because of the bias created by the sort of people likely to use last.fm, which leads to some unexpected results.

Another one is the Anti-Exponential Points (AEP) score, which measures how diverse your tastes are, based on the top 50 artists in your last.fm profile.

It’s a number that’s somewhere between -20 and 5 that shows how much preference a last.fm user has for his/her top artists. 5 is the maximum level for ultra-eclectic types – it means they’ve listened to each artist in their top 50 an equal number of times. If it’s less than 0, the user is probably an obsessive fan of the top artist, less than -10 and it’s probably fake. Mine’s 3.97, which sounds about right.

Not like the moon. She is very nice.

It’s my beautiful wife’s 30th birthday today.

FBI’s first chance to substantiate claims to its listenership came this week, with the station’s first listener poll, conducted by McNair Ingenuity Research. Of the 800 people aged 15+ across Sydney, in May/June 2007, six per cent had listened to FBI in the past week, 10 per cent in the past month. I’m not sure how that correlates to the standard commercial ratings, but it’s pretty exciting stuff – especially when you extend that six per cent out to 219,000.

I present a show at FBI, but this week it’ll be covered by Chad Gillard.

Orbital – Are We Here (Who Are They mix)
Paul Hartnoll – Please (feat Robert Smith)
The Cure – The Hanging Garden (live)
Joy Division – She’s Lost Control
Victor Xray Sound System – New Dawn Fades
Lush Puppy vs 8-Bit – Take My Soul
Telemetry Orchestra – Freakout USA
Some Freak – Lagos
The Sculpter – The Mad Aunty
Stalker – Visions
Bumblebeez – Pony Ride (Photek mix)
The Soft Tigers – MARIA
Cut Off Your Hands – Sorry
XTC – Complicated Game
Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd – Brian’s Nightmare/The Unknown Part 1
Monstrance – Chaingang
Monstrance – Winterwerk
Shriekback – My Spine (Is The Bassline)
Billy Bragg – The Boy Done Good (feat Johnny Marr)
Bis – The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
The Smiths – Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before?
Roman Revutsky – Collateral
The Midnight Juggernauts – Russia Rock
Strategy – Stops Spinning

Finally!

I haven’t been able to get The Signal out of my head (or CD player) since the disc found its way into my life. The new Urthboy album’s not out until July 14, but the first review just appeared, calling it “magnificent”, and said Tim “creates an instant connection between himself and the listener.”

Tim’s my brother – that’s part disclosure, part name-drop – I can’t wait for other people to hear it.

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Police officer Chris Hurley was acquitted yesterday of killing Palm Island man Cameron ‘Mulrunji’ Doomadgee two years ago.

To recap. A drunk Mulrunji was picked up by Hurley. They “tussled” at the station. At some point in the “tussle” Mulrunji wound up with four broken ribs and his liver torn in two.

Palm Islanders were told that Mulrunji’s death was accidental. They rioted for two days, burning the police station. Queensland police used heavy handed techniques to shut down the riots. The Queensland deputy coroner vindicated the rioters, finding that Sergeant Hurley caused the death. Later, the director of public prosecutions decided not to lay charges, not even disciplinary.

Noel Pearson said at the time:

Aborigines were looking to this [legal process] as a sign that they could actually rely upon the legal system, that the legal system was capable of dealing with them. It just shows that there’s a different value of a white life and a black life in the state of Queensland.

It’s hard to imagine the same outcome if skin colours were reversed, or even if it was Hurley rather than Mulrunji who was killed. Hurley admitted under cross-examination that in a “tussle” with Doomadgee at the back entrance to the police station they fell to the floor. Hurley said he “must have come into contact” causing the injuries that killed Mulrunji.

Hang on – four broken ribs, a liver ripped in two and hanging together by a thread of blood vessels. The man doesn’t know his own strength. I’ve never been to Palm Island. But on the face of bare facts, well established over a couple of years of investigative reporting, the case seems patently obvious. A man died under awful obvious brutality. Only one person was available to deliver the death blows. Welcome to Australia, the deep south.

Two bands from Canberra (Soft Tigers and the Young and Restless) and one from Auckland (Cut Off Your Hands) played last night at Spectrum.

On paper that looks like a good line-up. In reality, it was better. Well, until I glassed my wife, giving her a fat lip, it was. Those Soft Tigers were cute. Teenage faces, twee in a creative open way, fun and musically great. I bought their seven inch single, ‘Maria’, for five dollars.

Nick from Cut Off Your Hands fronted a band that is obviously far more experienced. It was exciting and pop, very ’80s in an XTC style, but post-hardcore. Nick threw himself about, at one point leaving Karina from Young and Restless looking bemused when he ran over and vaunted himself onto the merch stand. Tapes (yes, tapes!) and CDs fell onto the beer-soaked floor along with a beer glass that broke under Nick’s weight. His performance seemed pretty contrived though – while he did these wild moves he controlled the band with complicated hand signals – which undermined some of the thrill.

The Young and Restless were as great as everyone’s been saying. Karina is so natural on stage. She doesn’t need contrived tricks to command the space, she just does. The band rocks in a timeless way, they could have appeared any time in the last 20 years, but they seem effortlessly now – there’s nothing retro about it. Halfway through I raced across to see if there was a CD – apparently something’s out in a month. It was my friend Palu’s birthday, he even got a shout-out.

I wrote this review for Cyclic Defrost, but realised Max Schaefer beat me to the punch. So here’s my take.

Gudrun Gut’s debut solo album hasn’t attracted the kind of desperately hyperbolic prose heaped upon Panda Bear’s latest. I’ve caught myself wondering why, given it seems, to all intents and purposes, like a companion piece to that record.

Noah Lennox operates at the lower end of the frequency spectrum on Person Pitch, that lauded record, his ecstatic pop music built on the Beach Boys, glitch and droning reverberation and reflected in the deep throbbing bass of minimal techno. Of course, I Put a Record On is more explicitly rooted in techno, and with Gut’s half-spoken thick German accent it could be mistaken for the bordering-on-passe cliches of electro-pop. Don’t be mistaken.

It is self-effacing, which you’ve probably already gathered from the statement of fact that doubles as a title: “I put a record on,” she says. Simple as that. As though the creative process could be reduced down to the action. And maybe it is as natural as that, despite being a solo album, Gut is not new. The pale-skinned and pretty, in a black lipstick goth kind of way, West Berliner formed Einstürzende Neubauten at the very beginning of the 1980s, afterwards moving on to Malaria! and Mania D, and these days, runs the excellent Monika Enterprise label.

I Put a Record On is Berlin, it’s a woozy, wonky squinted view of the vitally alive, hazily decaying and sometimes business-like city. Polkas trade places with Marlene Dietrich riffs, piano accordions and Thomas Fehlmann’s techno percussion; Gut’s vocals switch from soaring to spoken in a moment, her approach by turns sultry and naive. At one point, the album drifts into dreamy instrumental hip-hop and circus organ, while on ‘The Wheel’ Gut cycles a reversed loop into a shoegazer-hazy pop song.

Her cover of Smog’s ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ is an unexpected surprise, and a highlight. Over a pared-back beat, and the rising tones of an organ, Gut sings, “I am a rock / bottom riser / and I owe it all to you.” It’s captivating, and understated, in a way that opener, ‘Move Me’ with its tech-waltz swing, flirts with destroying. That Gut can romance a polka and shuffling percussion, with her own murmured song, “I don’t know why I feel so strange / I don’t know why you make me feel so strange,” borders on the revelatory. It’s a perfect first song, but the entire album is like that. Unexpectedly beautiful, unlike anything else I’ve heard this year.

Matthew Evans, the former chief food critic at the Sydney Morning Herald, was sued over his 2003 review of Sydney restaurant Coco Roco. Following a $3 million fit out, the King St Wharf diner claimed to deliver a “new level of dining,” but Evans said “more than half the dishes I’ve tried at Coco Roco are simply unpalatable.” A jury decided that the review was not defamatory, but on appeal, the High Court judged the article to defame the restaurant.

An article in the SMH today makes the obvious point that this opens could open all critics up for similar actions.

Leo Schofield (himself the subject of a similar case in 1989) said:

If a poor review leads to diminished returns at the box office of the theatre, are we going to now say that it is due to the review and not to the quality of the work?

Is it possible that a situation like this one – where a local music writer and his publisher wound up at odds with a record label over a negative review of the band (the label allegedly threatened pulling their advertising) – could wind up in court? It’s hard to imagine a review in the Brag (the Sydney street press publication in question) deciding the fate of a new pop group like the Cops – music reviews just don’t do that any more – but what if it was shown to set the scene for ensuing coverage?

Not being a lawyer, I missed a crucial point, which cearta.ie explained here.

But this is only half the story. Because of the procedure adopted in the case itself, the proceedings were being conducted ahead of any consideration of the newspaper’s defences. No defence had yet been filed. Doubtless, that will be the next stage in the proceedings. So, we are only at half-time. The second half of the case is still to come, in which the newspaper can seek to rely on various defences, including no doubt fair comment. If the newspaper loses at that stage, then there can be wailing and gnashing of teeth. But not yet.

Moreover, the decision that the review could bear a defamatory meaning was not even the main thrust of the High Court’s decision. That was whether the Court of Appeal had the power (in the light of general provisions of Australian law relating to practice and procedure in general (section 108(3) of the Supreme Court Act 1970), and of the (s7A) procedure adopted in the case itself in particular), to substitute their similar holding for the different decision reached by a misdirected jury at first instance. On that issue, the High Court decided that the power did exist, and that the Court of Appeal had properly exercised it.

DJ Regal – Shock Ya Mind
Jedi Knights – Catch The Break
Global Communications – Into The Deep (Global Communications remix)
Amparanoia – You Know What I Mean
Tom Ze – Defect 2: Curiosidade
Milton Nascimento – Era Rei e Sou Escravo (I Was A King and Now I Am A Slave)
Milton Nascimento – Os Escravos de Jo (Jo’s Slaves)
Decoder Ring – Rough Sex
The Holy Soul – Funeral Plots
Deadbeat – Melbourne By Night
Ed Kuepper – Electrical Storm
Snawklor – Confluences
Saddleback – For Crying Out Loud
Night Radio – Chinese Lamps
Kid Cornered – Lost in the Fog
Her Name In Lights – Key
Pavement – Loretta’s Scars
Pikelet – Bug In Mouth
The Books – An Owl With Knees
The Veils – Lions After Slumber