It’s true I guess. Sometimes I get half way through the day and realise all the clothes I’m wearing are from Incu and half the best jokes music I’ve heard came from Chris Wu at Popfrenzy.

Designer Vince Frost, uber editor Jess Scully, Sydney Festival director Fergus Linehan front up with Chris and the brothers Wu for a blow by blow from Time Out’s Sydney Style Council.

Chris on Sydney:

Until last year, I had been to the beach maybe twice in ten years, and then I moved to Coogee. Not that I go swimming or anything, but reading the papers by the sea or just seeing it from far away is kind of nice which I would have never thought. Maybe next year I will actually touch the sand.

He gave Cyclic a plug too:

Cyclic Defrost is also a local zine that is worth consulting because the articles are well developed and the subject matters usually diverge from mainstream musical trends and are written with a lot of heart.

Time Out must be giving the rest of the city’s tired looking street rags a real fright. Decent features (mostly), interesting, frank stories. What next?!

ICE director Lena Nahlous came in to FBI this morning to talk about last weekend’s 2020 Summit. She took part in the summit’s creative strand, and was one of a small number interested in (and demonstrably capable of) talking about digital media, creativity (as distinct from The Arts), and the audience out there for art drawn from outside the big institutions; art and stories from migrants, young people and women.

A Victim – Omar S
Around the World – The Death Set
Track 6 – Fabulous Diamonds
My Life (feat. Newham Generals)- Dizzee Rascal
You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son – Wolf Parade
Water Curses – Animal Collective
Dancing On Our Graves – The Cave Singers
Footwork – Guilty Simpson
Shall We Take a Trip – Northside
Shut Up and Be Young – Parades
Magic Doors – Portishead
Goodbye Goodbye – The Lost Mariachi
I Feel It All (Escort remix – Feist
Marwurrumburr – Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu
Weapons – Son Lux
Counterpoint – Cleptoclectics
Eraser – No Age
Great Escape – No Kids
Arrabida – Portable
Slow Motion World – The Longest Day
Ethiopio – Noze

Thanks to Shannon O’Neill for putting me on to former Severed Head Tom Ellard’s hilarious blog.

In the coming week I am booked in for surgery, it’s a minor procedure and the specialist says that I will only be in the ward one night at most. This is a problem that many people are starting to recognise and secretly have treated – yet people are ashamed to talk about it. If you are of a certain age, you are more than likely to have this problem but you won’t find it mentioned on Oprah or even the medical blogs that crowd the net.

I have always believed in saying what needs to be said. Perhaps if I come out and say it, others won’t feel so ashamed.

I don’t like Daft Punk.

See also Ellard on ’80s music. And Shannon on this year’s Now Now festival.

Often I find these sit in a shopfront stunts contrived – like the infamous Jabba/Regurgitator band in a bubble one a few years ago – but Hiromi Tango, currently holed up in the new window space at Redfern’s Grantpirrie, matches the wonderful colour anarchy of Japan’s Harajuku girls with the reflective self-assessment that has to come with sitting in a shop front, among your thoughts, for days on end.

She was described as “very enthusiastic” in an Auckland Festival performance last year: “she would have liked to have slept in her shop and be there 24/7.” The current one, ‘Am I Here, Can You See Me?’, has progressed a long way since the pic on Grantpirrie’s website was taken.

I took this photo on my mobile this afternoon, and I think Hiromi was bustling around behind the mess of tags, thread and letters.

Visit soon, Hiromi heads to Melbourne for Next Wave in May, where the Queensland Government’s given her $10,000 to set up another public performance piece.

Brisbane sound artist/musician Tom Hall put together a series of processed field recordings in reaction to one of Hiromi’s earlier works in the Brisbane Arc Biennial. It’s available for download here.

The Guardian’s music section is on fire at the moment.

For one, you’ve got this fascinating piece on late 70s race relations in the UK, and the growth of the Rock Against Racism movement (with bands such as Aswad, Steel Pulse, the Ruts, the Slits and the Buzzcocks).

It was 5 August 1976 and Eric Clapton was drunk, angry and on stage at the Birmingham Odeon. ‘Enoch was right,’ he told the audience, ‘I think we should send them all back.’ Britain was, he complained, in danger of becoming ‘a black colony’ and a vote for controversial Tory politician Enoch Powell whom he described as a prophet was needed to ‘keep Britain white’. Although the irony was possibly lost on Clapton, the Odeon in Birmingham is on New Street, minutes from the Midland Hotel where eight years earlier Powell had made his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. But if the coincidence was curious, the hypocrisy was breathtaking: Clapton’s career was based on appropriating black music, and he had recently had a hit with Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ …

‘There is a danger in believing that politics is all top down,’ explains Ian Goodyer, who is writing a book on RAR, ‘that Thatcher just pulled the rug from under the racists’ feet, but the truth is that by 1979 Rock Against Racism and the ANL had thoroughly discredited the National Front.’ Before RAR, the NF had staged intimidatory marches in areas with large immigrant communities, but once RAR began to demonstrate that they could put thousands on the street in opposition to them, the NF were forced to retreat. ‘We isolated them at work and we isolated them at the colleges,’ claims Roger Huddle, ‘and by the end of it they were a spent force mentally and politically. I don’t want to overstate what we did, but I am sick to death of understating it.’

There’s also a short piece on the BBC’s new take on the art of making charts: Sound Index. It trawls Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube every six hours, counting and analysing around 10 million comments, posts, plays and views to make a top 1000 chart. It’s possible to filter by age, sex, genre and location. And if you just wanted a regular survey of a range of taste-making blogs or radio stations, for example, you can do that too.

And if you’ve ever wanted to know what was going on inside Fall singer Mark E. Smith’s head, they’ve got that covered too, dropping one segment at a time from the singer’s upcoming autobiography.

Northern Territory readers take note. I’m taking a virtual trip north today covering for the music guy on ABC Darwin‘s Mornings show.
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And… several hours later, I’ve chewed the fat with Mornings presenter Leon Compton, made my first ever appearance on the national broadcaster, and here’s what I played.

1. Institut Polaire – ‘Kentucky Society Drought’ from The Flora and The Fauna (Popfrenzy, 2008)
2. Dan Sultan – ‘Your Love Is Like a Song’ from Homemade Biscuits (self-released, 2008)
3. Ross McLennan – ‘I’m Heavy As I’ve Ever Been’ from Sympathy for the New World (Mistletone, 2008)

Sydney artist-run spaces and the work shown in them (at least last Thursday’s delivery) got dissed in an opinion piece by art blogger and broadcaster Andrew Frost in the SMH on the weekend. Frost’s not happy with what he sees as as a trend “towards the low key, personal and comic, as artists retreat to the quotidian value of their lives to find a connection with their audience.” It’s true, that is what’s out there. But having seen at least a couple of the shows he’s talking about, there was no shortage of wonder (say in Tim Moore and Tara Marynowsky’s show at Chalkhorse, Surry Hills), though the pieces were on the small and observational rather than State Of The Union scale. Doesn’t David Noonan have that end of the market wrapped up in his (admittedly gorgeous) Roslyn Oxley show across town?

Show number three. Sydney artist Peter Newman came in to talk about his video, sound and paint show at ICAN (the acronym seems more appropriate to the small space than the high falutin’ ‘Institute for Contemporary Art Newtown’) – it’s an immersive show that’s material and real and flickeringly indistinct at the same time.

(Canvas producer Jesse Cox with Peter Newman in the FBI studio)

(Peter Newman’s Swarm Transfer at ICAN)

Percussionist extraordinaire Bree van Reyk arrived in the studio a little later to talk about this week’s Synergy Percussion show (at Carriageworks) featuring a series of Reich and Xenakis works. It’s on from Wednesday this week, and I am excited.

Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind – Vashti Bunyan
Dragonfly – Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks
Your Love Is Like A Son – Dan Sultan
Danse Avec Moi – Noze
Little Bit – Lykke Li
City Walking (feat Abdominal)- Ghislain Poirier
LGOMWOCT – Alps of New South Wales
Gentle Elf – Kes Band
Fine Friend – Pale Saints
Right Here – Sun
Beat You Back – Dom
Same Suburb Different Park – Firekites
Quandary – Peter Newman
Headin’ Inside – Surf City
Roscoe (Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve Mix)- Midlake
The King Is Dead – The Herd
Barnacle Goose – Born Ruffians
Drumming Part 1 – Synergy Percussion
3 – Pikelet

Think there’s no local music worth getting excited about? Don’t. These two are making beats and are getting noticed around the globe, despite not having released a proper CD or record or even cassette tape.

(Aluf: listen)

(Westernsynthetics: listen)

Click the pictures for interviews with Dimitri Papadimitriou (otherwise known as Aluf) and Rhyece O’Neill (better known as Westernsynthetics).

I was amazed at the positive critical reaction to the Australian movie Jindabyne. It wasn’t just an awful movie. It completely missed the point of the Raymond Carver story (So Much Water So Close To Home). So thanks to Ben for pointing out this piece, which Guy Rundle wrote for Arena, and has subsequently been published in Best Australian Political Writing 2008.