I spent several hours at Canberra airport on Friday night waiting for a plane. Storm-tossed Sydney was hosting my ride, so I bided my time in the nation’s capital waiting for a lift to Brisbane, hoping to make it north in time for the Robert Forster sings the Velvet Underground set booked to launch the new Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art’s Warhol blockbuster.

The gallery opened late last year with the Asia-Pacific Triennial and Katherina Grosse’s immersive and surprisingly direct Picture Park, but all that’s a soft launch compared with the huge Warhol collection. Arriving in Brisbane you couldn’t miss it - billboards, banners and coverage everywhere. For someone who’s rarely seen Warhol’s work outside print, it’s something of a revelation.

Brisbane royalty turned out for the launch, half at least - and the plush VIP and public launch marquee was filled with silver pillow-shaped balloons (a la Warhol’s ‘66 installation Silver Balloons) and Robert Forster, the ex-Go Between, his partner Karin Baeumler (violin, vocals), Dylan McCormack (The Polaroids), Adele Pickvance (Go Betweens) and Susie Patten (I Heart Hiroshima) covering the Velvet Underground.

That’s Forster’s comb poking out of his pocket. Some people commented (unfavourably) that the band played the songs pretty straight - which is true - but it was far from a by-the-numbers performance. It was the first time the five musicians got together on stage - Forster said he’d only met Patten the Tuesday before the show - and they radiated a kind of contagious excitement.

‘White Light/White Heat’ got a remake though. And how. Drenched in white lights, the band was blistering, coruscating, electric. Here’s a video I shot on my compact camera. It’s distorted, but it’ll give you an idea.

A cameraman from ABC’s Sunday Arts program recorded most of the show (though not from the stage, Forster warned him off early on: “The people should be able to see the stage”), so there should be proper footage appearing before long.

(it looks like the band took it to the next level, with half time costume changes. not true. they played two nights - same set, right down to the northern soul dj and the disco dj playing the same songs in the same order - still great both times though)

Read my review at Mess + Noise. Despite my long love affair with that magazine, and the fact that I was listed on their contributor list when the mag first kicked off, this is my first.

My experience at the show was no doubt accentuated by the stress of waiting in an airport hoping I’d make it in time, and then making it with minutes to spare, but the long and the short of it is that even at 30 minutes long this was one of the most enjoyable shows I’ve been to all year.

Since when did music magazines put artists on the cover without doing a feature in the middle?

I picked up the latest jmag expecting Urthboy in depth, but that’s all it is. Less than 60 words.

I walked up to the Teachers’ Club on Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, on Friday morning, sure of only one thing. I was going to get some good coffee. Across the street from the club’s new conference facilities is one of the top two coffee purveyors in town, Single Origin Roaster (though as this review says, the owner can be a little unnervingly friendly at times) - I needed that after radio the night before, DJing alongside SYLK and Catcall at the Oyster magazine launch the night before that, and the day job - suitably refreshed I crossed back to the Teacher’s and into the mass of people making/hoping to make new connections.

Most of the conferences I attend are organised by professionals, with months or years in the making, and this one was nothing like that. Tom Dawkins and Cassie Charlton, the organisers from Vibewire, had blu tac and posters and programs and all manner of other paraphernalia spilling out of arms and bags, and, half an hour after the keynote was to begin, the posters were still being affixed in the main auditorium. But given they had six weeks to get it together, at the same time as running their electiontracker coverage - well it was a pretty good effort getting it together.

Billowing masses of jargon clouded up the place in Mark Pesce’s keynote, but his sharply inspiring ideas cut through the obfuscation relatively unscathed. Instead of dwelling on technology, he stepped back and looked at the way people interact socially in terms of human nature and biology. His basic premise was that left/socialist and right/libertarian philosphies, the two bookends of partisan politics, are rooted in basic biology.

The tension between altruistic and selfish behaviour.

Darwin broached it in the Ascent of Man saying morality provided no advantage to the individual, but immense advantages to the tribe or group (these quotes were abused by colonising Brits - probably a large reason why they’ve been dropped from the evolutionary canon) - and until recently biologists didn’t accept altruism as a natural phenomenon, expecting individuals to work for their own good and that of their children. Ants and bees, which don’t obey the selfish ’survival of the fittest’ laws and yet produce highly successful colonies, were a spanner in the works for biologists, but, just this year, biologists started publishing on the idea of “multi-level selection“. Suddenly you’ve got a scientific justification for the tensions between altruism and selfishness as critical factors in natural selection - and compelling support for politics/social media/human nature taking in elements of both.

Basically social groups do better for the individual/children if they’re selfish, but they do better for the group if they behave altruistically. You need both.

Dunbar’s work on social group size showed that humans have an optimal group size of 150. The first urban groups (1000+) appeared 10,000 years ago, and, since then, we’ve had more people in our circles than our cortexes can keep up with; competing groups, and real advantages to be gained from altruism. That’s skyrocketing. Pesce argues that, “In the network era, the benefits of altruism disproportionately outweigh selfishness.”

Wikipedia vs Encyclopaedia Britannica is a good example. Now everyone, no matter how marginalised, can make a contribution to society. And (here’s the important bit), Wikipedia gives a selection advantage to everyone who reads it, simply by giving them access to the facts.

Pesce discovered a community of amateur online psephologists (via Crikey) including Poll Bludger and Possums Pollytics. By sharing their election stats knowledge, these bloggers brought readers up to a shared level of understanding - a point where all parties could take part in debates and advance the group’s knowledge.

This idea of blogging communities isn’t as neat as the wiki resource, but it’s equally important. In this knowledge sharing environment, spurred on by the thrill of conversation and competition, the group makes advances in ideas and understanding that they wouldn’t have individually. This idea holds equally true with music blogs by people like Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Emmy Hennings… try it.

“Sharing is the shape, promise and danger of the world to come,” according to Pesce, a future that’s described in John Robb’s Brave New War - equal parts good and bad. There were no easy answers, just (for me at least) quite a step up in thinking about where it all fits in.

More to come…

My backyard.

Came home last night and it’d fallen on some shiny new car.

Could the Sydney Festival lineup get bigger, I doubt it. Oh okay, I guess they could get Lou Reed and John Cale to do a Velvets reunion, with TV On The Radio doing an artspace gig somewhere, and the entire Can’t Stop It! lineup reprising the hits of Oz Post Punk. But living in the real world, Sydney Festival is pretty hot.

Latest announcement: Caribou, hooking up again with Mountains in the Sky, with added vibes from Jamie Lloyd, and me and Somatik playing records. Damn!

It’s FBI Radio’s supporter drive this week and next, and I’ll be on the air tonight (9-11pm) drumming up the love. It’s not for profit, virtually everyone volunteers, but although FBI’s not a commercial station it still pays commercial rates for everything. 6% of the funding comes from the government; the rest (more than $500,000 a year) has to be raised through our supporters. There are loads of prizes for renewing and new supporters too.

You can sign up here or if you want to speak to someone the number is 8 33 22 900.

Sydney was battered last night by a huge rain storm, Canberra’s getting cleaned out too.

(pic from SMH)

Rudd’s probably no better than Howard, but the prospect of those guys in power for another term had me on edge all Saturday afternoon. It didn’t help that I was hanging out with Howard lovers as the Liberals took an early lead. I was starting to rant about indigenous rights, asylum seekers and the like, so I said my goodbyes - “Guys, I’ve just gotta go” - and headed to the 2SER party at the Bat & Ball, Surry Hills.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever been happier to arrive at a venue. Underlapper were playing - gorgeous spine-tingling stuff - and a bunch of close friends were hanging out by the bar. The ALP and Greens started their ascent, Maxine McKew and Bob Brown gave stirring speeches, and the Liberals were out. And I won the Oz politics/economy board game Poleconomy - a Monopoly-esque game featuring loads of companies that no longer exist.

A sad counterpoint is that the inspiring Bernie Banton finally lost his battle with asbestos-related disease.

The new issue of Cyclic Defrost is out this week with launches in Sydney and Melbourne around the corner.

Interviews with Aaron Martin, Boy Is Fiction, Burial, Cameron Webb/Seaworthy, Clinton Green, Roger from Extreme Records (and a free Extreme sampler CD), Francis Plagne, Cailan Burns from Pretty Boy Crossover (our guest cover designer), Ivens, Mark Pritchard, the Nam Shub of Enki, Odd Nosdam and Danny Jumpertz from Feral Media.

They’re all online now, with several web exclusives including my vox pop from Australia’s emerging dubstep community and interviews with Solo Andata and Victor Bermon. Truckloads of reviews too.

The launches…

Sydney - Sunday Dec 2 from 6-10pm - Concrète @ Sticky Bar, via Taggarts Ln, off Crown St (Surry Hills) Sub Bass Snarl (live soundtrack to film), Peter Newman & Scott Morrison (live audio visual performance), DJ sets from Eli and I. Entry by donation with all proceeds going to the Hope St Mission.

Melbourne - Thursday Dec 6 from 10pm - East Brunswick Club (280 Lygon Street, East Brunswick) Terminal Sound System, Marc Hannaford, Robert Vincs, Scott Tinkler and DJs. $10.

New Horizons in Violence - The Preserved Head of John Howard
Die! Die! Die! - Promises, Promises
Ivens - Well Oiled Machine
Naked On The Vague - Old Leader
Indelible - Left Right Left
Burial - Untrue
Lyrics Born - I Changed My Mind
Wax Tailor - The Man With No Soul (feat Charlotte Savary)
Shawn Lov - Can’t Complain (feat Tony D)
Dan Kelly & the Alpha Males - Drunk On Election Night
Faux Pas - Changes
iLiKETRAiNS - Death of an Idealist
Institut Polaire - Lullaby For a Warmonger
Built To Spill - Liar
By The Fireside - Join The Circus
Prefuse 73 - I Knew You Were Gonna Go
Jape - Always Knew
Thief - Does It Make Any Sense
The Heavy - You Don’t Know
The Lucksmiths - To Absent Votes
Yo La Tengo - Fourth Time Around
Psapp - Leaving In Coffins
The Darling Downs - Every Time We Say Goodbye
Clairaudience - A Big Dose of Love is What’s Needed
The Royal We - Back and Forth Forever
Black Lips - Step Right Up

Thanks to Leigh Tran, Bim, Alistair, Emmy and Mel for the suggestions.

If you’re still wondering just who to vote for on Saturday, Get Up’s How Should I Vote site might help. They’ve polled candidates in every seat in the country on a range of issues. Complete the 20 question quiz and see how your views stack up against the candidates in your seat. It also has primers on the election process and a guide to each electorate.

This Saturday Australians get to vote for a government to take us through the next four or so years. It’s exciting in a way that Grand Finals will never get for me, and I’m absolutely hanging out for it, so tonight’s Join the Dots (FBI 94.5 from 9pm) is all about the election. No, I’m not going to dig into the back-catalogue for Rudd’s high school trio or Downer’s ’70s glam outfit, though I may fit in a Midnight Oil number.

Instead, at this stage I’m lining up Boyz II Men’s ‘End of the Road’, D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ (as used by UK Labour), Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’, World Party’s ‘Put The Message In The Box’… it’s not looking great is it. What do you think should make the cut?

It was only two weeks, but I feel like it was months ago that I last sat in the studio at FBI playing a Join The Dots selection. This week, Emmy Hennings is in for our regular segment, The Voice, and we’ll be talking Burial. Here’s a taste from Emmy’s glowing review of Burial’s Untrue for Cyclic Defrost.

Right now my favourite is ‘Etched Headplate’, a song (if that’s the right term, and I’m really not sure that it is) that makes no more sense to me now than it did three weeks ago, upon first encounter. (And what is an etched headplate? An android with a serial number? A person with a turntable and stylus in place of a skull?). Everything here is stretched and warped: the bass, which lifts up like building panels in a steady wind, a huge whoomphing noise; the voices. The voices. Imagine Beyonce’s ‘Dangerously In Love’ with the yearning increased by about three thousand-fold and you’re somewhere near the emotion of it. Then picture that r’n’b voice splitting into three thousand glyphs. Content becomes form; meaning becomes the shape of those voices gliding and spiralling out, and then stopped, rewound, sent down several pitches between syllables. All that’s steady is the sound of the cigarette-lighter percussion, flicking on, off, on. It’s just gorgeous. Heart-bruisingly, brain-fryingly gorgeous.

I’m still yet to get the proper version, and Hyperdub’s promobot is digging into my brain. So, on Thursday night, we’ll be playing cuts from Untrue, and Emmy will chew the fat about her Burial interview for Cyclic Defrost, plus Sam Cooke, Beyonce, Groove Chronicles and whatever else crosses our path in this occasional dig into the human voice.