The Instant – Alphateam 107
Purplene – Scars for Scores
C-Minus Project – Cold Winters Day
Sam Shinazzi – Scotty Come Home
Seaworthy – Map in Hand Pt 2
Scissor Lock – Knives For Christ (edit)
Adrian Klumpes – Weave In and Out
Shoeb Ahmad – Fabrique
Radiohead – Like Spinning Plates
Scissor Lock – Fables for Lost Eyes
Scissor Lock – Fractions (with David Bruce)
All India Radio – The Quiet Ambient
Telafonica – Tape Noise (Marshall Watson version)
Bovaflux – Ohne Namen
Xiu Xiu – Ale
No Through Road – I’ve Got Something on my Xiu Xiu
Birth Glow – Hey Little Hen
Always – Practical Joke

If you want to be safe, you should take advantage of the lock on your scissors.

I started getting demo CDs from Newington high school student Marcus Whale a year or two ago. He was in year 10 at the time, I guess he must be getting close to finishing by now. Which can only be a good thing because the kind of instrumental post-rock/sound art sounds he makes will find a far more responsive audience in arts/uni circles. He’s in a band called Gioconda Smile (not much recorded, but there’s a song at their myspace), but the reason he came to my attention was his Scissor Lock CD-Rs.

Marcus runs a 3″ CD-R label called Curt (tribute to a certain dead rock star?); so far it’s just Scissor Lock, but plans are underway for a Shoeb Ahmad disc (with Lawrence English and M. Rösner).

He’s also playing a gig this Friday and appearing on my show tonight (9pm on FBI 94.5).

DOWNLOAD: Scissor Lock – Above & Below (from Lost Children netlabel)

The SMH reports today that Bjork will play to around 5000 on the Opera House forecourt. Brian Wilson’s been booked for shows too.

Once upon a time, the Sydney Fest was generation-shifted to at least my parents’ age-range and generally even further. But over the past few years, it’s turned around to become one of the best in the country, and from this report and other rumours on the grapevine, this year looks like being more of the same fantastic-ness.

I guess the festival might still have their eyes on a Hal Willner production (a la Came So Far For Beauty/Berlin) – maybe it’s still on the cards – but I reckon a live musical version of Dancer In The Dark would be pretty much irresistible.

The less said about Wilson, whose show last year at Splendour in the Grass was only entertaining in slapstick terms, the better.

To put that last post in perspective, here’s a new Gutterbreakz mix that surgically details the idea I scratched out in this mix. Gutta’s mix is the 25th from the Bloggariddims series.

It’s split in two: first half is deep techno (Deepchord, Substance, Claude Vonstroke, etc); second is dubstep (Pinch, Gatekeeper, Skepta and so on). But it’s the accompanying commentary that makes it crucial.

There can be little doubt that, from an innovatory angle, Electronic Dance Music is currently stuck in one of it’s occasional fallow periods, with no radically new options on the agenda. Although ‘stasis’ might be too strong a term, then certainly it is a time of Consolidation: to paraphrase Simon Reynolds, the delicate balance between Rootical and Futuroid is firmly tipped towards the former. Bar the odd maverick sound-chemist (For techno see Villalobos, for dubstep check Shackleton) dance music is slowly eating itself, gorging on it’s past glories. So what’re you gonna do? Sit around moaning because you’re not getting your regular ‘Shock of the New’ fix? Start listening to barely-listenable transmissions from the experimental fringes or, god forbid, the Arctic Monkeys instead? Me, I’m perfectly happy with the situation right now. It’s given me a bit of breathing space to really delve back into much-loved sound worlds that I’d left behind years ago.

I like the Arctic Monkeys dig at Reynolds too.

I’m not the only one calling for a big beat revival, go here and find Melbs DJ Scattermish touting Fatboy Slim. I won’t go quite that far, but people dissing big beat and bigging up the recent Baltimore/hyphy/baile/etc thing should take a long hard look. Both raucous hedonistic scenes; both inclusive to a fault – meaning the recorded output is/was all too often a boiled down blend of influences, rather than the richness of the DJ sets. It was always better in the mix, especially early on: check legendary Jon Carter and Chemical Brothers Live at the Social mixes for proof.

It’s no coincidence that a lot of the beats coming out of the current scene fit so well with big beat: gun clatter breaks, hiphop and reggae samples, fast or slow, etc. Time for the return.

There’s a new mix from Melbourne’s Faux Pas at the webzine Research & Development.

i tried to put together a pretty straight listening mix, not much in the way of home studio beatmatch trickery, just a bunch of songs i like, put together in some order that i hope is pleasing.

J Dilla – E=MC2 (feat. Common)
Davy DMX – The DMX Will Rock
Black Moth Super Rainbow – Rollerdisco
Emperors of Blefuscu – Savage Customs
The Books – Ghost Train Digest
Skeletons & the Kings of All Cities – Hay W’Happens
Agitation Free – Ala Tul (Faux Pas edit)
Charles Magnante – El Cumbanchero
Homelife – Seedpod
Made in Sweden – Little Cloud
The Sylvers – I’ll Never Be Ashamed
The Kinks – People Take Pictures of Each Other
Roger Roger – Sounds Industrial 2
Pyrolator – Die Haut der Frau
Nino Ferrer – Looking For You (Faux Pas edit)
Cleptoclectics – Interstellar Taste Lapse
Curtis Mayfield – Trippin Out (Cassetteboy edit)
Augustus Pablo – Stop Them Jah
Wings – Letting Go

It’s a great mix, but what’s even cooler is that Tim’s giving it a blow by blow breakdown on his blog.

DOWNLOAD: Faux Pas – Listening Mix (from r-n-d.net)

Rand & Holland – Sleepless Nights
Kiss My Poodle’s Donkey – Gett Off
Sun – Sleepin’ (Hrvatski remix)
Sun – Mosquito
Oren Ambarchi – Stactedit
John Frusciante – Emptiness

—
Unlikely Pairs with Andrew P. Street:
XTC – Dear God
The Smiths – How Soon Is Now
Along with soundtracking a fair amount of teen angst, both of these records were originally released as b-sides.
—

Bjork – Hope
The Sugarcubes – Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow
B-52s – Mesopotamia
Birth Glow – Palm Tree Ukelele
Guy Blackman – Unsteady
Belle & Sebastian – Lord Anthony
Brad Strut – Caught Up (feat Daniel Merriweather)
Mark Ronson – Stop Me (feat Daniel Merriweather)
Daniel Merriweather – She’s Got Me (Calculators remix)
The Calculators – Another Story
8 Bit & Ladyboy – Houndog (Atom Heart remix)
Snog – The Last Days of Rome (Calculus mix)
Nam Shub of Enki – Break a Lung
Monster Zoku Onsomb – Monday Mornin’ (Croxton remix)

The podcasts at Radio Waves From Space are generally killer. So I was happy to oblige when Adrian Burns (aka Drox) got in touch about podcasting my Overland From Kabul mix. The post’s here.