First week back. I’d like to say doing radio’s like riding a bike, but the combined force of several thousand kilometres of jet travel conspired. My guests were great though.

Angie Abdilla and Canvas producer Jesse Cox.

Angie’s documentary Wanja debuts Wednesday at the Sydney Film Festival.

Nick Warnock and Emma Ramsay.

Emma’s one of the directors at Quarterbred, a regular thing at Erskineville’s PACT Theatre. Nick’s playing this Thursday and Saturday with his band Onani.

Barumba - Jackson Conti
If It Rains - Robert Forster
Dancing on our Graves - The Cave Singers
Sandshoe - Peret Mako
Go Go Go - Teki Latex
Shade Darker - Gatekeeper
Million Dollar Bill - D’Opus & Roshambo
What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome - Justin Townes Earle
Snake Bite - Wagons
Stay Tuned - Robert Wyatt
Karaoking - Plastic Palace Alice
Beat You Back - Dom
Let Love Begin - Roger Loves Betty
Only For the Heartstrings - Daedalus
Good Lies - The Notwist
The Author - The Rational Academy
Which Way to Go - Eddy Current Suppression Ring
Vision Bell - Dappled Cities
You Have to Dance - Noze
Let It Out - Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities
Who’s Dope - DJ Trip

People cried supergroup when the Sea & Cake appeared pretty much fully formed 14 years ago.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the word is such a damning indictment given there’s an almost universal understanding that music shouldn’t be put together by the Machiavellian forces of whoever. Music is something accidental and special. But this bunch of friends winding up in a group together a decade and a half ago was every bit as wonderfully serendipitous as any others and the fact they were in a string of bands before then is just extra.

Art school freed Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt to mess about on stage, in Shrimp Boat and The Cocktails respectively. When Shrimp Boat imploded, Prekop and band-mate Eric Claridge invited Prewitt and John McEntire into the new group, The Sea & Cake. Somehow Prekop and Prewitt, two guys with no musical training and definitely no background in jazz, wound up critical players in Chicago’s post-rock and freeform jazz scene.

The number of bands and collaborations and creative projects they’ve embarked on since is overwhelming. It flashed through my mind, listening to Prekop’s latest solo album squeezed onto a Tokyo subway, on my way to interview the pair at their hotel. Offbeat, warmly intimate jazz pop of elegance and soft beauty, it’s a long way from the avant rock and wild jazz squeals of his Chicago contemporaries, but dig below the surface and it’s all there. We – me and half of Tokyo – file out of the train and head into a blustery afternoon.

[While the duo were in Tokyo for shows in a range of configurations (The Cocktails, Chicago Underground Duo, Sam Prekop, and Archer Prewitt), I lined up an interview with the pair for a magazine at home. But the story didn’t end up running, and the transcript’s been sitting on my laptop ever since. With the Sea and Cake in Australia this week I thought it was high time.]

Jet-lagged and stuck between a string of Tokyo interviews, Prekop was dazed and laconic, Prewitt was reserved and interested.

Prewitt: Are you from Canberra? I know a girl from Canberra, maybe you’ve met her?

No, it’s odd because Canberra’s one of those places where you do actually meet everyone.

Prewitt: She’s in Melbourne now though, I just wondered if you grew up there or something.

What’s happening with Sea & Cake?

Prekop: Nothing right now, probably in the fall we’ll start writing some songs and thinking about making another record, he says in a laconic voice.

Have you taken time off from the band to work on other projects?

Prekop: Yes, when I decided to do this latest solo record, I never planned on it taking up as much time as it actually does, ‘cause now it’s already been a year ago that we recorded it. And I’m still, like dealing with this record, this is still part of the tour for this. So that’s the time, it’s always like double what I think each project is going to be, and same with The Sea & Cake, you do a record and it seems by the time you’re done with it and finished touring it’s been two years.

Does that drain your enjoyment of the release?

Prekop: A little bit. Actually I didn’t really finish this record until I think it was October actually. We finished the basic tracks about a year ago, but then I spent the summer working on the lyrics and then mixing it. So actually it’s not as old I just made it seem. Yeah I’m prone to getting pretty restless with whatever I’ve just done and I usually like write it off immediately, like ‘oh it totally sucks, time to do something else’ y’know? (snaps his fingers twice briskly), it’s moving on! Or whatever.

Is that feeling of being ‘over it’ after an album’s release why you pursue so many different projects (comics, painting, writing, photography, as well as music)?

Prewitt: Like a restlessness? [Prewitt chimes in often with some thoughtful comment, but rarely says much unless specifically asked.]

Prekop: It has its advantages, and disadvantages, but I mean it’s a, it is a nice sort of ‘out’ for each, you know, if this doesn’t work out then I can always fall back on this other thing. I’ve never actually abandoned a project like mid-term or whatever, he laughs, ‘nup not working, gotta do something else’ but there is a certain safety in that aspect to it.
Plus it also is facilitated by this you sort of end up agreeing to all these deadlines,

Is that deliberate, do you sign up to do a record or a gallery show for a deadline to work to?

Prekop: Right, I wish I could break that sort of habit, not to be flippant about it, but now I long for [the time] when I had no opportunities and I was just waddling in this sort of expressive creativity with no direction whatsoever (laughs through his nose, both of them chuckle). No deadlines because nobody cared.

How much has that change over the past 10 years affected the way you and your Chicago contemporaries collaborate? I guess when you started you had a lot of time for each other.

Prekop: I was talking about that earlier. Like with the Sea & Cake we’ll probably end up working toward a record right away, but I was thinking it’d be nice to not do that, but [instead] act as a band, write songs, play them live, do some shows and just not be so project oriented. But we sort of have to regiment it just to get it done, but it’d be nice to write songs just because you can and not just for a certain record. I think it would make for a different kind of material and ultimately a different kind of record.

Is that what you were originally aiming to do with your solo albums? Or was it about creative control over the project?

Prekop: No, for the first record my idea was to try and do an actual solo record where it was just me doing everything but I hit a total impasse, which presented a revelation that I’m much better at getting other people to do good stuff in the name of Sam Prekop (his head rocks back as he laughs) so I decided that’s one of my better skills as a facilitator, and then I quickly panicked and put together the band that’s on the first record. That’s sort of how the Sea & Cake started as well. I was writing tunes for something (he pauses) and it wasn’t quite happening, so I enlisted other people into the project, that became a band and this became a band too.

(Sam Prekop backed by Rob Mazurek on cornet and Chad Taylor on drums)

Why put out a release under your name when there’s a band involved?

Prekop: I just couldn’t come up with a band name, sorry! But I was like, I could call it a band, but if I just put my name on it it’s sort of easier to figure out. It is different, because it’s definitely a band through the bulk of it, but after we did the basic tracks, I was the one that dealt with making sweeping edits and mixing and making the broader decisions. You know, there was a drum part on Dot Eye, Chad was playing drums on the beginning and I just cut him off, took him off the tune. I didn’t call him up and say is this OK? Whereas that would not have happened on the Sea & Cake, it would have all been conferred and decided, I would have still got my way probably (laughs).

Archer, is it true you’re often disappointed in the results when Sam adds his songs to Sea & Cake recordings? (When recording, The Sea & Cake lay down instrumental songs in the studio, then Prekop takes them away and adds his vocals over the top.) I’ve noticed that when the vocals aren’t there it really changes the feel/mood of the music, from pretty dark at times to a real light contented kind of feel.

Prewitt: I just find it interesting that that’s the way that Sam likes to work and I think that in a lot of ways it’s really refreshing, because after all the work is finished with creating music that would be essentially background music for the voice to work over, to interplay with, we get to hear this whole new way of listening to the song through Sam’s ideas of phrasing and vocal melodies and things like that, so it’s interesting that it’s after the fact of creating basic track, something that’s sort of a fascinating way of approaching, when I write songs I sort of integrate vocal melody or lyrics at the outset before presenting it to the group so it’s pretty interesting. It’s not that I don’t like it, just something to get used to.

Bossa nova plays a part in your music; especially in Sam’s vocals where you get the lightness of Tropicalia. How important was it early on?

Prekop: I think I was working along similar lines before I was fully aware of all of that Brazilian material, basically when we discovered it it was sort of this weird confirmation, it certainly illuminated certain things that I felt like I was doing already by accident. That I could hear in the real stuff, sort of set a different light on it, but I never it’s not something I consciously went for. I really got into that music and it sort of seeped in properly, I was steeped in Brazilian music for a couple of years.

I’m a fan and that’s sort of my take on it, I don’t claim to have any real expertise with Brazilian music, but it’s certainly had an effect. With this record, I’ve tried to sort of not steer totally clear of, but just be aware that it’s something that I’ve already done a little bit and I don’t want to just keep reviewing that sort of strategy.

Sam, where did it all begin for you, with music?

Prekop: I started (picks up Shrimp Boat CD) in this band. I mean playing/musical experience or whatever I just had no innate musical ability, it came up in an art school environment so even though I didn’t know how to play anything we were just sort of egged on and encouraged despite ourselves and that’s what sort of set me up.

Was that the first time you picked up an instrument?

Prekop: Yeah.

And what was that?

Prekop: A guitar.

When did you start singing?

Prekop: At the same time.

That sounds so intimidating, playing an instrument is one thing, but putting your words out there seems pretty brave.

Prekop: When we started, we didn’t play in public for quite a while. I mean we were hardly accomplished when we played our first shows. What helped I think was Ian [Schneller] was actually pretty good at playing guitar, so we could hide behind him a little bit and the mixture was quite exciting, I mean I was just blown away that we were doing this stuff and it sounded like music. I had always been into music, of course, I just had never played it. And the people that would come to see us were prone to being open to whatever’s going on. At the time in Chicago there was a lot of performance art stuff happening and just very open-ended attitude towards going to see people. And then that small crowd grew a bit and that encouraged us to keep at it. Still hasn’t stopped.

Archer, did you find it difficult when you first arrived in Chicago?

A: In a lot of ways it was similar to the music environment in Kansas City, I think there was just more, people with more skill and maybe a little more breadth of knowledge. More music passing through town, more to see and be inspired by.

Sam and I started learning guitar at 21, so we kind of got into it late and I think that’s why we sort of operate in similar ways as far as the self-taught vocabulary and the chord choices, we both went to art school, so somehow it just aligned in a nice way when we started working together in the Sea and Cake’s early days. Sam, like he said, used to work with Ian Schneller, who’s a pretty accomplished guitarist and then switching to work with me and I keep things pretty minimal and do a totally different type thing. In that way, the very early beginnings of that band gelled in a very interesting way, like right off the bat it felt like something exciting was happening.

On record too, right from the start it was a very distinct sound.

Prewitt: Right, it was also fortuitous that John [McEntire] was working at the studio at the time and when things weren’t quite happening drum-wise, he stepped in and that’s when it felt like the whole, in a very short amount of time the whole thing made sense.

Sam, I’m interested in your writing technique. I’ve heard that you set out ideas and material into ‘lyric situations’ and then just let it out.

Prekop: I’ve always felt loose and reckless with words. I’ve never felt tied down by them, they don’t have to make too much sense. I’ve always taken the same attitude, I mean my style has been refined over the years, but I use similar techniques that I always have. I don’t always have stuff written down when I’m beginning, often I’ll just start singing, whatever, and in a recordable situation. So I’ll be singing along with these basic tracks that we have and then listen back to whatever gibberish I’ve been singing, going out and then coming back and I’ll hear certain couplets, write those down and add to that and try to sort of link things together and develop a theme, at least an impressionistic theme.

It’s very evocative, with the muted style and phrasing, specific words seem to be invested with more meaning, despite the difficulty discerning an objective meaning for the overall stream of words.

Prewitt: I think the phrasing adds a lot to the meaning, or the melody of it. When I used to go see Shrimp Boat, it seemed to me to be the first pop skat singing. Essentially he was just, I thought it was pretty brave of him to get in front of a bunch of people and basically sing whatever came into his head and even if that meant nonsense words or sounds.

Prekop: Yeah, at that point I was full on improvising live.

Prewitt: But every now and then, even if the song had been recorded and had sort of established things going on, it was pretty exciting that the lyrics could change at any time. Especially now that Sam and I have been doing these duo shows where you can really hear the vocals and when he walks the plank lyrically and just goes off on a tangent it’s pretty exciting stuff.

Prekop: There’s this one Sea & Cake song, which we do now fairly well as a duet, and there’s this long end part, where I have certain lines that I’ll definitely use in this end but I go at it as if I’m messing with the melody quite a bit and it’s pretty much different every night.

Prewitt: It’s kind of like a guitar solo. To me it’s nice that there are similarities each night, but there’s also stepping off into space, see where he goes with it is pretty fun stuff.

How difficult is it working with different people, what challenges do you find in collaboration with so many different people?

Prekop: What’s weird for me is I’m often thought of as playing with a bunch of different people all the time, which is not actually the case. It’s basically the Sea & Cake and this group. And the thing with me is that whoever is playing with me it sort of has to be on my terms a little bit because it’s all I know how to do. I can only play this way or sing this way. I don’t think Chad and Joshua would have played like this before this, so I’m flattered.

It was interesting to hear your piece with Scott Herron on the Prefuse 73 album, it was quite different from any of your previous stuff, your voice straining against his cut-up beats.

Prekop: Yeah. That was a little weird because what he gave me to work with didn’t really have anything to do with the final track so I barely remember what it actually sounded like, so when I did finally hear it sounded like something else entirely. So we didn’t really collaborate on every step, which made it sort of interesting, he was using me more as raw material, but a lot of my melodies were somewhat intact. And then he augmented it, accented it, edited. The music all around it, I didn’t hear any of that when I was coming up with it. What he gave me was a beat with some piano chords.

Do you not like being out of control like that?

Prekop: Not at all.

You were saying before that you always add your vocals to Sea & Cake at the end.

Prekop: Well if I thought that it really didn’t work then I might have a different attitude.

Are you interested in following up those kind of collaborations?

Prekop: Since that I’ve had other like ‘hip hop’ dudes call me up, I don’t know, I’ve sort of always blown them off. I got an email from umm Goldie the other day.

Prewitt: For real?? (laughs) that’s hot.

I was listening to One Bedroom on the way over here, to me that sounds like a broken beat track, except with lower drums. With a lot of that stuff the vocals never quite work that well, it seems as though yours intuitively does that.

Prekop: umm. I would be up for something.

Archer, could you tell me what the idea is with the Cocktails dolls?

Prewitt: The first thing we did was a cloth doll and it was kind of an extension of what I was doing with my own art, which was, there was a show I did right before the cocktails made cloth dolls where I made a huge pegboard piece with like hundreds of cloth dolls for $5 a piece within a fine art context. They all sold out, people thought it was really funny and it sort of lightened the mood of the gallery situation, which is kind of what I wanted to do. That’s what I like about printed books and comic books and things like that is that it’s portable and it’s art if you want it to be. we just thought that would be fun to continue, to put that idea towards the band and just sorta heighten the live show experience. And take it to a comedic fun level, while still commenting on consumerism and I think at the time there was some boy groups that were having dolls made of themselves. We were just like that ‘oh my god, we gotta do dolls’

I quite like that aspect, I was reading you studied bookmaking/printmaking and it came out an interest in art that’s more accessible.

A: There was a number of us in a group that were printmakers and we all liked the idea of demystifying the art of it and just sort of having it be kinda crude and accessible and fun. So it was something we could silkscreen and do ourselves, at some point one of our housemates had a letter press print, so we stepped it up a bit and made it look a little nicer. So we’d come up with an idea, laugh about it, shake on it and make it happen.

Looking at some of your visual artwork, it has a similarly hazy feel to your songs. There’s a bit of detail, a bit of landscape, but it’s quite abstracted as well.

S: Say the same for the music in that it’s always one element counterbalancing another element that might, it’s always this interleaving of delicate contradictions one after the other, which I always like.

What was it like getting the Cocktails back together?

A: it was actually pretty enjoyable. Because I’ve always been friends with them and it ended amicably so as far as the music goes it was fun to just reinvestigate it and see it 10 years on and it sort of held up pretty nicely, and plus I just love playing drums, so for me it’s a real pleasure to play drums again. A little out of practice but I do enjoy playing drums. It’s fun to be around them in a musical complex, when we were going to do this Japanese tour we recorded some music for it, an EP for these shows, and that was really enjoyable, even though I didn’t get to be around for the whole process, I definitely wasn’t around for the mixing of it, so I haven’t even heard the final thing. It was just fun to know that it’s open-ended and it’s not really a band, but we can interact and it’s been pleasant.

How were the shows received?

A: really well, people yelling ‘we missed you’ and applause, made us feel really good about it. Especially in Chicago, just really friendly crowds and we did this one show where we opened for The Pixies and we thought their crowd would hate us, but there was a lot of old Coctails fans.

I imagine there’d be a lot of overlap.

A: yeah it was nice. We thought noone would even see our opening act. but there were all these people crowded into the front.

I can imagine that, because it was always a fun band, the music is infectious.

A: that’s what I find, because I tend to write music that’s more melancholy in feel. Even in the Cocktails I was the one to write the more dark tunes. just sitting on the drums and a lot of the time the songs are so dopey, I just crack a smile, because it’s sorta hilarious that some of these little melodies are so quirky and odd that I just start laughing. But really it’s an extension of all our humour. While I do find they’re pretty goofy songs, there’s a depth to the humour that I think we all share.

Are you a fan of The Pixies, what were they like?

A: I do like their music, I didn’t get to meet them they didn’t come back to say hello.

Your solo releases have been quite different to the Sea & Cake and the Cocktails, it’s more of a folky feel especially the latest one that gets into Cat Stevens territory and Jackson Browne.

A: well I think a lot of it has to do with just the acoustic guitar being in the mix more now than in the past, I think a lot of people draw those comparisons. While I do like Cat Stevens and I don’t like Jackson Browne, I don’t really listen to them as much as I would other records say from a similar time period. For me, the choice to use acoustic guitar was when I was listening back to my other records I noticed that the electric guitar occupied a lot of space in the mix, so I decided acoustic sits better and kind of it’s prickly and rhythmic and then the music comes up under the bass and the drums in a nice way where it hints at the changing chords without it sorta hammering you over the head the whole time. so it was more of a sonic choice, I wasn’t necessarily trying to make a folky sounding record.

A lot of your guitar playing in the past used a lot of effects.

A: I like that too, trying to come up with something that would excite my ears and augment the song in a nice way, but not overtake it. I like to work in an ensemble way rather than, I’m not really a soloist.

That gelled with a lot of the electronic stuff that was bubbling below on Sea & Cake tracks.

A: yeah, I mean as far as keyboards and things like that it’s sort of nice if whoever comes up with an idea that seems right, that part that gets used, it’s not like one person plays the keyboard part in the band, so that’s a nice point of musical collaboration. It could be John who comes with something, or Eric, Sam or I, so it’s just sort of whoever comes up with the melody that seems to lift the song up a little bit and change it up.

What made you start writing comics?

A: I just always liked them and I think after art school was up I kind of gravitated back towards baser arts and I’d done so much printmaking that had a cartoony look to it, I think it was just naturally coming back to something, leaving the gallery scene and thinking more about books and serial imagery and when I settled on doing Sofboy I was coming to grips with life in the big city, coming from a small town, and sort of addressing some of those urban tensions I was feeling in a humorous way, it helped me laugh at things that were getting me down.

It’s pretty different from other comics – it’s very grainy and real.

A: I must say the first issue is kind of in response to a lot of what seemed to be happening in comics at the time, it was becoming very sorta arty and heavy and I want to poke a little hole in that and throw a real slapstick thing into the works. A lot of the comic books I was into as a kid made me laugh and I wanted to do something that’s funny. So I did this little tiny book, I wanted it to be really garish colours and just dopey and funny and about visual humour. Initially it was a response to the raw art and the coffee table books that were coming out at the time.

Where did the characters come from?

A: just sketching, without a lot of thought about it, just seemed like something that was funny to me and I never really wanted to investigate what he’s made of or why he exists, I just sort of presented it as something that is a reality in this cartoon world. There’s no Origin of Sofboy issue in the works or anything.

It can be funny, but there are edgy elements as well?

A: I’d say, yeah. I’ve had people write me specific letters that Sofboy is very disturbing for them and they cry when they read it, I’m fascinated that someone could sort of get that out of it, because I think primarily I’m going for humour. I know that there’s a lot of melancholy and sort of edgy qualities to it, just below the surface, you know it can be a really quick read or you can slow down until it’s decipher some things.

I think you both, with your lyrics, don’t tend to say anything too overt, the meaning is often in the turn of phrase or snatch of lyrics.

A: I feel uncomfortable telling a story or following a thread of thought throughout the song. For me it’s like, the way I’ll write a song is sort of an amalgam of chords and sections. And so accordingly I like to develop little (tape ends) … nothing too specific, so I try to just allude to things. I’m not trying to keep it universal, I’m just trying to impart something without being too overt.

You do get some feelings.

A: yeah, this is the most uncomfortable record for me to write, lyrically.

It was for your father, right?

A: he sort of comes in and out of the record as far as what I’m touching on. There’s a number of older songs on the record that I never seemed to get lyrics for, so I kind of put them to the back and for some reason I started to approach them again with ideas that I think stemmed from his death. It started having this cohesive feel lyrically.

Was that because it was engrossing your thoughts at the time?

A: yeah I was just thinking a lot about family and a lot about our lack of interaction and yet we did have, there was a real depth to how we communicated with each other and there’s a lot of similarities with our personalities, so I was just thinking a lot about life at the time. it’s a pretty intense period, my wife would go away to work and I’d just sit with a guitar and you know it was the only time I really sorta dealt with those emotions, so it was good to delve into that. But again it was the most uncomfortable record to make.

Do you find it tough performing those?

A: yeah. Sometimes. More in a solo situation than when I’m with the band, ‘cause I tend to hide behind their sounds and then I don’t really concentrate on what I’m singing as much, but there’re points where the band comes together and it’s like this crescendo and it’s a little overwhelming sometimes. (looks at Sam and asks) Do you want to pick up where that left off?

S: Nah, I’m just trying to stay awake.

Is there much emotional content in your songs Sam?

A: I think this new record is very emotional.

S: (looks up bleary eyed) I’m tired now, but I’m too, too hyper. I usually don’t work from specifically emotional content. I’m trying to be as expressive as possible and that can be emotional but it’s really the actual content.

It’s not so much a narrative?

S: No.

A: I sense there are narratives within the songs sometimes.

S: yeah, I mean, I think I’d have to listen back to ‘em,

A: I’d have to try and piece something together. The lyrics continuously evolve as I sing em live whatever meaning I thought wasn’t there crop up later on, certain things will start to resonate that I could not have recognised at the point when I actually wrote it. I think those things happening are important to writing good songs. That’s how I want to do it, I don’t want to know everything, cause I don’t know what a lot of the lyrics are literally getting at, through time different interpretations present themselves.

It’s difficult to pick up explicit meanings, but you definitely get a mood.

A: I mean I appreciate the singer/songwriter tradition and well-crafted songs that are lyrically cohesive, but I also like a more poetic, impressionistic where there’s more possibilities for myself and I think Sam definitely writes in an open-ended poetic way. (lots of laughs, and jetlagged kind of exhausted smiles)

Any plans to head to Australia?

S: I would love to, there’s just never enough money so it’s always trying to do it in concert with coming to Japan. I went once about five years ago, it was great.

A: I’ve played there a lot.

S: I played totally solo, which I’m not sure who was trying to get me to come this time, I can’t remember, there was some label…

Aaron at Spunk?

S: yeah, and he was trying to get me to come totally solo and I’m like ‘maaan, that’s no good, I don’t like it, nobody else’ll like it’

A: that’s not true

S: but I like doing the ‘dowhat?’ thing, so it would probably be like the two of us and we have this show with two of us playing guitars and that’s great. I think it’s on par with the full band, it’s totally different, but me totally solo… It’s not great..

What sort of work are you putting together for the show in September?

S: It’s painting. The theme of the show, it’s a landscape show, a group show in this museum and we each get our own biggish room and I’ll have about 10 paintings. In davenport island(?)

You were saying you might do some recording after that?

S: the other thing I’m doing is a book of paintings, so that’s taking a lot of my time, or will be. and also archer and I are doing another short tour of Europe and Spain.

The Sea and Cake have a new album, Everybody, and an Australian tour this month, and if you can make it I’d suggest you do.

Dubstep’s been pretty online since moments after it appeared - hyper online cats like Kode 9 probably had a seminal role to play, but blogs, online zines and message boards have played a crucial role in developing, describing and disseminating the sound. But the latest publication to upset the dubstep pond is none of those. Instead it’s a black and white printed fanzine.

Woofah’s history was drafted before the zine even hit the streets; the thing was written and edited by bloggers, self-deprecating types they are, who promoted the hell out of it.

I’ll tell you where it started - John Eden burbling in a pub. “I HAVE THIS MASTERPLAN,” he began, doing the index finger-jabbing-the-table-on-every-syllable thing he does all the time. “A MAGAZINE CATERING FOR GRIME, DANCEHALL AND DUBSTEP. WHAT WE’LL DO IS…”

I’m sorry, I truly am. One of the seminal moments in the history of fanzine culture. The DIY publishing equivalent of that time Hitler had one too many in the bierhall and started his “Jews this, Jews that” rant. The hands of history on our backsides. And what did I do? I drifted off. I caught the end of the odd sentence…”TOTALLY INDEPENDENT”, “NO ADVERTISING”, “HONEST REVIEWS”…but I’d left my body about 5,000 miles behind. Oh come on, who actually knocks out fanzines anymore?

You can find the rest of that rant here, but the long and short of it is that they actually knocked out a fanzine, which was delivered across seas and into my mailbox (I mentioned the thing here).

Anyway, I’m sitting on a panel in a few weeks called ‘Why bother with print?’ about media changes brought about by the internet. It’s part of a larger conference, New Connections, organised by Vibewire, with talks on social networking, online communities, health, engaging rural people, web 2.0 and other fascinating topics.

I’ll be representing the niche music (print) media makers, so the concept of Woofah kicking off as a print-only publication had my curiosity piqued. I got in touch with John Eden, the editor and founder of the mag.

“In the ’80s and ’90s there was a thriving network of zines covering all sorts of subjects,” says John. “And I think I missed that. The inspirations for Woofah would include reggae zines like Boomshakalacka (’90s), Reggae Quarterly (’80s) and Pressure Drop (’70s).

“I also felt it was important to provide a forum for a bit of cross-pollination - maybe showing some die-hard reggae fans a bit about dubstep and grime, and vice versa. There are a lot of very exciting things happening now and doing the mag is one way of us actively contributing to that, or supporting it rather than just buying tunes.

“Plus I’ve managed to meet a lot of very talented people and wanted to do something completely independent that would be a good home for them to do their stuff whether that be writing or design or photography…”

It’s pretty standard music mag: interviews, pages of reviews and so on. I guess the thing I wanted to investigate was the editors’ decision to go print only, considering dubstep’s such an online community.

“For me it’s the same as vinyl vs MP3,” John says. “People tend to invest more time and attention in print, it feels more special and that allows us to do more. For example I imagine a lot of people are happier to be interviewed by a print magazine than by a website, ditto sending us things to review.

“The downside is the cost, of course, and the time it takes to pull things together rather than just whacking it online. But this means that not many other people are doing it, so I guess we either have an edge there…

“I also think that magazines are a better way of absorbing information. Sitting down with a coffee or sitting on a bus with headphones on is much better than furtively scrolling down pages of text at work.

“Print attracts the hardcore - and that is what we want.

The contributor list for Woofah includes Matt B (Idle Thoughts), Melissa Bradshaw (Plan B), Droid (Bloggariddims), Simon ‘Silverdollar’ Hampson, Dan Hancox (Guardian, New Statesman, Dazed), Martin C (apparently not that Martin C), Gabriel Heatwave, Paul Jasen (Deeptime, Riddim.ca), Paul Meme (Grievous Angel), Georgina Cook (Drumz of the South) and Woebot.

A big cast, and a very vocal one, which is why the mag had a lot of profile before it even appeared. But what actually happened when the Woofah dropped?

“The feedback we’ve had has been brilliant, far better than what we could have hoped for. It really seems to have captured people’s imagination. Loads of people have got in touch to say ‘well done’ and suggest things for future issues, we’ve made it into the Dubstep Forum Press Poll (as have a number of our contributors) and we sold out the first issue in just over a month.

“The print run for our debut was 700 copies, which was all we could afford to print. I split the costs with Paul Meme/Grievous Angel and my half came from flogging a few tunes and old zines on ebay. Quite
clearly we should have printed much more, but it was all a bit of a risk initially - it seems crazy now, but we genuinely had no idea if people would want Woofah or not!

“Issue 2 will have more pages and a bigger print run and hopefully some colour.”

At just about the same moment in time, another dubstep zine, Blastoze, appeared. A little glossier, a little younger (maybe), it seems to have sprung out of Dubstep Forum. It’s otherwise pretty similar - issue one, no date yet for issue two - print only, on principle. I haven’t read it yet, but it features interviews with Vex’d, DJ Distance, Tes La Rock (Bare Dubs), Marlow (Storming, Hot Flush, Boka), BunZer0 (Dubstep Forum, Sub FM), Mate (Warriorz, Urgent FM) and Reload-Radio.

Here’s the blurb from their website:

First of all we’d like to welcome you to the first edition of Blastoze. Secondly we want to explain to you why Blastoze is a fanzine and not a magazine: A fanzine is a nonprofessional publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest. We want Blastoze to stay free of charge!! We know that as soon as money gets involved, our drive will be gone and stress will be involved. We can’t say precisely when #2 will be out, but hopefully you’ll be able to get your hands on it at the end of 2007.

Talk about the zeitgeist.

Really just a breaking the drought post. It’s thinned out while I’ve been up north in Alice Springs and Darwin, but I’m back, Cyclic Defrost is back from the printers, and a few of my articles are in there and online.

Various artists: These are some serious times (review)
Jamie Lloyd interview (online only)
Kharkov: Keeping it corporeal (interview - print/online)
Mist and Sea: Ice caps melt (interview - print/online)

One week after I arrived in Shanghai, to live, which is a long story in itself, I got a call from a friend inviting me to cover Norway’s Oyafestivalen for whichever Australian music outlets I was writing for. Considering I wasn’t even in the country that meant a few very quick phone calls, and ultimately a review, interviews with Shining, Datarock and this one with Subs (originally published in Nylon, but that’s since folded).

One! No money
Two! No family
Three! No job
Four! No future

Five-foot Kang Mao (above, centre) explodes from the tiny stage at the Last Train bar in downtown Oslo; her short black bob whips around her head as she screams out the words. The tiny New York-style bar is packed way past capacity with music heavyweights from across the globe, some intrigued by the idea of Chinese punk rock, but most excited by the rumours of Subs’ exhilarating live show.

The Ramones-esque Beijing quartet belt out a fiery blend of hardcore punk, rockabilly and heavy ’70s rock.

“Until 1995, China didn’t have punk,” says Kang Mao, speaking dialectical Mandarin spiced with bits of English through an interpreter. There were so few people that liked punk,” she continues, “particularly in our city Wuhan, so, of course, you knew everybody.”

Guns’n'Roses, Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson CDs were readily available, but she bonded with guitarist Wu Hao, drummer Ah-Dong and bass player Zhu Lei over Nirvana, Fugazi and Alice in Chains CDs that arrived as what the Chinese call “dakou”.

“Basically, you look at the spine of these dakou CDs and there’s a strip missing,” says the diminutive punk, “like someone took a blade saw and just went zzzt.” Record labels across the world cut a notch from the plastic case of surplus CDs, marking them as ‘remainders’ to be sold cheaply or destroyed. Thousands wound up in Chinese garbage dumps and China’s alternative record stalls and, Kang Mao says, without these “dirt cheap CDs, there’s no way we would be here, they were the primary source of music for us.”

But although music was leaking into the country, it was still tough to find instruments, and tougher still learning to play them. High quality instruments were extremely rare, and cheap instruments were out of the range of poor punk kids. A friend of Kang Mao’s bought an electric guitar because he wanted to play punk rock. He got the guitar home and couldn’t understand why it was so much quieter than his favourite CDs. Kang Mao giggles explaining he hadn’t bought an amplifier. “There really was no institutional way of finding out what a guitar is or what it could do,” she says. “We didn’t know you had to put the effects box into the wire and the other effects box into the guitar, the electric guitar into the amplifier.”

Their new demo album, follow up to the debut Subs Life EP, captures all the ferocity of Kang Mao’s voice, with a tougher rockabilly nod to Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion.”There’s a lot of different things going on in each piece,” Kang Mao says. “We don’t want to spend time talking about what we’re not satisfied with, I mean there’s a lot of stuff that we’re excited about and we want that to come out too. There’s hatred, but there is also excitement and happy so fine emotions running into each song.”

Desperate the frustration that obviously underlines Subs’ songs, there is also a lot of mischievous fun. Ah-Dong says drily, “Well look the woman’s angry, but the three of us are having a good time.”

Here’s their manager, Jon Campbell (pictured, left) on Subs for his column at Pop Matters.

LISTEN:
Subs - 8 O’Clock
More Subs songs at Pure Volume.

NEWCASTLE four-piece Local Knowledge seemed to be pretty much everywhere last summer. I was temping at a local paper and got asked to write a pretty patronising piece about Aboriginal culture in the city. The cool thing about it was that I got to go and speak to Hetti Perkins at the AGNSW, composer David Page, and the guys from Local Knowledge.

Musically their sound wasn’t mature – the sharp programmed drums, grinding Miami bass style bass, jagged scratches and sometimes way too enthusiastic rhymes were a lot to take in on a first visit, but there was something great about them. Despite the serious material they deal with, I found it tough to leave one of LK’s gigs not beaming. Lots of other people took to it too, they got loads of high profile shows (including Homebake and supporting the Herd at the Metro), as well as high rotation on Triple J and Channel V. Their music is hugely engaging, the constant energy driven by JT’s incessant scratching and the three MC’s intensely choreographed show (at times a little too ‘boy band’, but pretty charming nonetheless).

Before a gig at the Hopetoun in January I sat around a table upstairs with the band. I stopped freelancing and this story got killed, so boomp, here it is.

You’ve been together three years, how’d you get together?

Joel: We started as a, you know a record label put us together as a boy band… nah (cracks up laughing at his own joke) you’re going to write that down too, Joel sucks arse. I was doing a lot of music stuff and doing lots of work with young fellas in schools and different programs like that. Adi and Wok were doing more traditional cultural youth work as well.

Adi: At different camps the young Aboriginal kids were in trouble and that, they weren’t listening to us, not to the extent that we wanted to impact on them. You know, their identity and utilising music to get into their heads, because they were just going to the old stereotypical black person of trying to be black American gangsters and that wasn’t cutting it for us. So we thought we’ll go and have a yarn with Joel ‘cause he produced music, let’s start something, let’s start our own hip hop group.

Was it as clear as that?

JT: Pretty much.

Were you all doing involved, like JT, were you DJing?

JT: I didn’t come in until early this year, I hooked up with Joel a few times.

Adi: Bit of a DJ, huh, bit of a DJ (teasing JT)

JT: I was DJing and he said ‘I’m putting on events for young kids and that’, he gave me the first opportunity to play in front of an audience and I was producing as well, a lot of dance music as well, so just the chance to play in front of an audience was unreal, and then I moved on to clubs from that, the boys went and did Local Knowledge and after a while they called me up.

Were you all MCing before the band started?

Adi: Nope.

Joel: I was and Wok was singing country.

Adi: I sort of dabbled in singing, but it got to the point where, you know, we liked hip hop music, we thought man, to make an impact on our community, where it’s needed we need to utilise hip hop music to get our own message and we thought let’s make it cool to be Aboriginal.

Was it always going to be hip hop?

Adi: I think everyone grew up with it, like as young black, your cousins were always into hip hop. My brother was a traditional dancer and Joel was doing producing for other stuff and a couple of other mates were doing music and we’d done traditional performances and we just thought let’s combine the traditional culture with hip hop music.

Joel: I still remember when I was like five, going to weddings and all my cousins would be break-dancing, getting up, beat-boxing and rapping. That’s the way I got into it, with all the rellos in Cairns. Playing basketball and volleyball – volleyball’s huge up there – that’s how I got into it, that and reggae was pretty much what I was brought up on.

What sort of hip hop?

Joel: Back then it was more those weird breakbeats, weird breakdancing music. I’ve forgotten some of the artists though.

Adi: 2 Live

Joel: Nah, 2 Live Crew came later when I went through puberty.

There’s definitely some 2 Live in your show now.

Joel: Definitely, back then you couldn’t get a 2 Live Crew tape in Australia. I was in Cairns when I was 10 and my older cousin said ‘Have a listen to this’ - Banned in the USA - and it was all just porn music, so I was into it. There was just this one tape and everyone just taped it. NWA, Public Enemy, they were probably the main ones that were in your face, but I was more into some of the other stuff. I got into one group called COD, I don’t even know what it stands for, but that was the first, Fu Schnickens, yeah, that real fast almost raggamuffin kind of raps, so that was that reggae influence as well. I was into Geto Boys, heaps, just because they were so ghetto. You look at G-Unit and all them mob and they’re all buffed up and all that, but y’know the little midget [in Geto Boys] was a messed up lad and Scarface, it was just a crazy group, the best fun, like real proper.

You can tell that DJs are behind the group (as well as JT, Joel’s a long time DJ), it’s in the huge momentum of your shows.

Joel: Yeah we only got 30 to 45 minutes, you know? And you want to go hard, as hard as you can, we’ll leave the slowing it down for all R&B singers. I guess the thought I have in the back of my head all the time is…putting my kids to sleep, you get them going hard for 30 minutes then they’ll go to sleep for a lot longer. When you have kids that don’t sleep, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

How important is being a Koori hip hop group to the way you approach song writing?

Adi: We know there’s not much of a voice for our people at the moment, we’ve got a few role models out there doing their best and we’ve got to try and do what we can to get a messages out of what is needed in our community and represent our people to the fullest in a positive way where we can make a difference. Not just in our community, but also wider, changing stereotypes and attitudes, just to make it cool to be an Aboriginal man, ey.

Joel: It kinda sucks that we have to go to that kind of marketing level to sell it, but that’s where it is today, which sucks arse, but I think once people start getting a feel for the real, content of what Aboriginal identity and Aboriginal culture is about - so in our lyrics we always talk about respect, and the land.

Adi: Respecting your self as well.

How much is that linked to the land?

Joel: I grew up in Cairns mainly, but then in Newcastle. It’s always important, just because I guess the sense of belonging somewhere, of really belonging somewhere and knowing that you have those connections, so my traditional ties are with around Bundaberg, Maroochydoore, Kabi Kabi mob there and just knowing that my people, my mobs have lived there and are part of the land for 80,000 plus years, you know, it gives you a sense of pride saying I actually belong here, this is where I’m from. Like totems and animals from that area, frilled-neck lizards are our tribe totem. Having that connection with the land is pretty important and I pretty much got that from my grandma, she’s always travelled the land, you know when she turned 60 – she’s the same age as Vegemite, so that’s how we keep up with her age – she bought a campervan and travelled around Australia by herself and everyone thought she was pretty crazy, but she just has that respect for the land and travelling over different places and just feeling it and being recharged by it. You can probably say that the reason why Aboriginal people have got such poor health is just because, well look at the land, it’s just so torn to pieces and wrecked. Not just with uranium mining, cotton is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. You go out to Tamworth and Moree and they’ve got these cotton farms that take so much water to grow, it’s just like what’s going on here?

What’s it like moving around Australia, can you explain what it’s like to go to different areas? Does it make you feel disconnected from where you grew up?

Joel: It’s all different. We always pay respects to the traditional mob and doing that protocol, you know where you are and once you know where you are, it’s no big deal, because you’ve paid respect to them traditional ancestor spirits on the land and all the people there acknowledge it. So it is different, different landscapes and different feeling and that, but if you’re going on someone else’s land and you always pay respect then you’re always going to be part of it still.

What’s it like coming to the city?

Adi: There’s always that protocol, even though there are many people here, we still pay respects to the old people here and the Aboriginal community that’s here. Just because other people are here doesn’t stop our protocols happening

Wok: It doesn’t mean we’re not on Eora land or Gadigal land or whatever, it doesn’t make any difference to us, when we go we pay respect. And we still feel the spirits wherever you are regardless of whether you’re in the city or you’re out in the areas where everyone stereotypically says ‘oh that’s where the Aboriginal spirits would be.’ You know, out in the desert, no different whatsoever man, whether you’re in the city, bush, on the coast, we pay respects and we, we feel the spirits wherever we go.

Joel: A good example is Newcastle Mall. Newcastle’s the fifth largest city and yet the town mall is never ever packed, businesses go broke in that place and one of the stories says there’s a sacred site built underneath it, that’s why people feel wrong going there.

What about Sydney?

Wok: You’ve got people here who have no respect for other people, so they obviously have no respect for themselves, they come here practicing things on other people’s land when they haven’t even got permission to do it and I see it as they’re praying to different gods, but the gods of this land, where they’re on, are Aboriginal gods, and I say man they’re praying to our gods really, their gods are somewhere else. But the ancestor spirits are on this land, man we’re going to continue to practice our protocols and do what needs to be done, because at the end of the day we’re Aboriginal people first and musicians next, because when we’re not musicians any more, we’ll still be Aboriginals. Even though music and dancing is such an important part of who we are, at the end of the day first and foremost we’re Aboriginal men.

Adi: We’re just Local Knowledge and we know where we’re going as far as our music is concerned but we’re being guided by our old people and we’ll continue to be guided and we don’t have musical aims so much.

Joel: When we got together it wasn’t about getting fame or making money, it was about an ideal and making things better for your mob. One of our goals is starting up our own black schools, Aboriginal-taught schools, not just for Aboriginal kids, for all kids. But just how we teach, you know the Aboriginal perspectives in teaching and learning, is what’s going to be put in the schools and it works, it’s been proven it works so much better than the western school system, which hasn’t really changed in the last 500 years.

With Aboriginal perspectives you have men’s and women’s business and when I was doing lots of work in conduct disorder classes and kids with special needs, you know behaviour difficulties, as soon as you take the girls out the boys is fine. Just understanding those differences and even having stage-based classes rather than age-based, because age is just a number, it’s what you know that makes you a better person. People learn at different ages, you can’t put everyone well they’re the same age, well they’re all gonna be the same.

Adi: I suppose we’ve got life goals, not music goals, music goals are just goals along the way. And what we started out as, which is young Aboriginal men trying to make a difference in our community.

Music’s been a big part of Aboriginal culture for a long long time and in the past fifty years it’s been coming out as country or even hip hop.

Wok: I mean you look at the uncle Vic Sims and uncle Reggie Nox, Rory Mcleod, No Fixed Address (all of them are throwing in names), Warumpi Band, we do look at those people as musos, but more so we look at them as warriors. When we say warriors they don’t necessarily have to be out there with spears or guns, they’re just kind of like ambassadors, they’re out there representing us, good role models, doing it, giving you something to strive for.

Adi: They’ve been role models to us

Is that your role?

Adi: We just keep chipping away at it and hopefully it’ll be easier for the next generation of musos, whether they’re Aboriginal, Anglo or young Asians. I mean it goes a lot deeper than just the Aboriginal thing, we always say it’s a basic human rights thing.

Joel: we just want to be a part of something that’s more than BBQs and VB, Australia’s got the oldest forms of human artwork, people spend too much time trying to explain instead of just accepting that’s how it is. That’s a big difference with the way I was brought up and western culture.

Joel: Australia’s got the worst suicide rates in the world, especially of Aboriginal people, and it comes back to that, a feeling like you don’t belong. In Newcastle, at one of the high schools, a few weeks ago, a 15 year old kid hung himself at school. It sucks to know that kids don’t want to live at all.

Adi: It’s that feeling you don’t belong and I think that’s the biggest lie that, I suppose, government in Australia has put out through the school system. The one thing is what’s going on at the moment, with the racial wars, and the leader of the country is denying that it’s racially motivated. And you’ve got people standing up there saying ‘go back to your own country, this is our country’ and all that, they have no connection to the land and they don’t respect the land, they came here as visitors in the first place and the thing is they’re standing up there making fools of themselves.

What are we, bloody mirages? Aboriginal people in this country.

We decided we weren’t going to market negative things, we were really going to work on positive images of who we are and that’s where the song Blackfellas came from, it’s a really positive, uniting thing. And probably our next single will be ‘Aussie Hip Hop’, we’re going to get all the local groups, whether Aboriginal or not, we’ll just get our friends. Which will be a true representation of Australia, we’ve got heaps of white friends, black friends, they’re all people. There’s good and bad in everyone, how hard is it to respect other people?

Joel: We wanted that to be our foundation, personally, we had all these frustrations and music’s a good release. Let’s get it out there and say what we need to say instead of running amok. There’s a lot of people that say ‘here they go, the Aboriginals are sooking again’ well, we noone would have to sook if you fucking listened in the first place, because nothing’s been done.

Adi: People say, ‘You make us feel proud to be Aboriginal when we see your film clip on TV’ now that makes me feel good as a person, when I see another Aboriginal person saying yeah there is light at the other end of the tunnel. The negative thing is what a lot of our listeners go through every day, the last thing they want to hear about is all this sort of stuff when they’re living it, it’s like you want to get away from it. So instead of focussing on the bad things, we give them, not even an escape from reality, it’s an eye-opener.

Hang on a bit, there’s a lot of bad things going on with yourself, but you are part of the oldest race in the world brother, get your head up, get on track, get an education, do what you need to do.

Local Knowledge used to have a website at www.localknowledge.org, but it’s lapsed. They now have a myspace. There’s a great article at The Age, Triple J has a live and transcript interview from Ausmusic month last year and some great pics, plus several interviews at Vibe.

Datarock’s Ketil Mosnes is on his hands and knees grasping at a pair of indigo jeans. Their owner, and the Norwegian duo’s other half, Fredrik Saroea is crawling under a backstage trailer at Norway’s Øya Festival. Watching the sun set on Oslo, it’s turning into that kind of night.

(Datarock at Oya Festival, Norway, 2005)

Earlier they played to 5,000 Norwegian music fans - their biggest audience ever – a crowd who arrived early to hear Datarock’s crayon-scrawled funky grooves. They didn’t disappoint. Along with eight musicians from Oslo hardcore and punk bands, apparently a few on stage just to get free tickets to the festival, as well as their own choir the New Traditionalists, Datarock prowled the stage.

“I have problems expressing myself because I’m drunk and I’m not that good in English, but this festival is quite special,” says Mosnes. Shy and self-effacing, he is the antithesis of hipster party boy Saroea. “You know it’s a festival for people who are into underground stuff, but I was shocked that so many people turned up to see us play.”

Saroea is back on his feet and racing across the road to a grassy embankment. Kristin Winsents, a DJ from P3 (Norway’s equivalent to Triple J), is urging the twosome to dive head first, like a human ten pin bowling ball, into a beer bottle-laden table. It’s not a new stunt either; Mosnes broke bones doing it at last year’s festival.

It’s been a great year for Datarock, whose debut album was memorably described by Nick Sylvester at Pitchforkmedia.com as a shot for instant pleasure that accidentally ended up being much more than that, ‘sorta how mom and dad ended up with five kids’. Norwegian pop princess Annie included them on her new DJ Kicks CD describing them as her favourite band from hometown Bergen.

Dressed in red and white striped tracksuits, their smart casual imagery brings to mind Manchester’s Happy Mondays, a band regularly invoked in Datarock reviews. The comparison had seemed generous for the record, which is closer in spirit to contemporaries LCD Soundsystem or !!!. But live it makes perfect, gloriously messy sense.

“I played in some really stupid punk rock bands here and Fredrik played in this trash metal band,” says Mosnes, who grew up on a soundtrack of Dinosaur Jr, Built to Spill and Pavement. He says it was a natural reaction to the jazz his music journalist father played around the house, but his musical palette broadened on moving to west coast university town Bergen. “It’s a small city and you can’t choose between that many clubs when you go out, so sometimes we just ended up in disco clubs.”

The tension between punk and funk that fires the duo has sent a factory load of other groups up the indie charts. But instead of reducing that potential to a pop formula, Datarock embrace the messy fun of disco punk. It’s philandery that winks at indie kids, electronic geeks and the Bee Gees. Wedged into a patch behind the public toilets, Mosnes and I suddenly realise that Norwegian psych group Madrugada are about to finish and the bustling queue for the toilets has gone quiet. We both have another drink ticket to cash in. Racing for the bar seems like the right way to end the interview.

(originally published in Nylon magazine, Australia)

Datarock - The New Song

Datarock tour Australia this month, gig details at their site.

Just announced, Datarock play the Mandarin club this Sunday (Feb 19).

Taking time out from tours with Nine Inch Nails and My Morning Jacket, Saul Williams is out to Australia this month for the Sydney Festival. Williams was one of the big highlights at the Oya Festival in Norway last year:

“Saul Williams is like a bomb exploding on stage, a man possessed. Out of Rick Rubin’s shadow, Williams is awesome and his MCing is far closer to hip-hop than the spoken word he’s usually associated with. MPC-manipulator Adlib (aka Thavius Beck) tears out Brooklyn/Wordsound-style junglist breakbeats and broken beats, it’s a fiery concoction that prods Williams into one of the best hip-hop performances I’ve seen this year. It’s threatening, empowering music, with subject matter ranging from black power and Sierra Leone to diamond mining.”

I hoped to interview him here, but it didn’t happen. Fortunately, Dale Harrison from Cyclic did and the full Q&A is up at the blog. It’s especially interesting because Dale’s in the interview, if you know what I mean, and Williams is pretty frank too.

DH:From my perspective I’d draw a line between mainstream hiphop which i’d actually refer to as pop music more than hiphop per se

SW:Well, I disagree. People become blinded by something because it’s gone platinum. If that first 50 Cent album ain’t a dope ass hiphop album I don’t know what is. Granted I cannot imagine 50 Cent repping for breakdancers, graffiti writers, you know he doesn’t represent the hiphop culture like some would like him to do. But is he dope ass MC? Yeah… Has he become comfortable as a dope MC and is he now starting to get weak as result of getting comfortable? Yeah. But anybody getting comfortable gets wack. Y’know, don’t get comfortable.

I’d say he’ll be worth seeing at the Sydney shows.

After getting dissed by Annie far too many times to mention - she blew off our first interview in Norway when I was there in August, cancelled a phoner back in Sydney, twice - the editor at 3D World gave me a stapled wad of A4 dodgy Q&A action with the pop star.

It’s in 3D this week. She even got a pull-out poster. Annie’s touring mid-Jan to Australia, doing a DJ set on Saturday January 14 at the Basement.

For more Annie reading try Chris Porter’s short piece for Harp or Nick Sylvester’s great interview for Pitchfork, they actually got to meet her.

“The ‘ethnic’ group of indigenous Australians is just completely invisible. When the election campaigns are running now, we just don’t rate a mention,” says Hetti Perkins.

Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, Perkins is also daughter of Charlie Perkins, who started the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and led Australia’s freedom rides in the ’60s.

I interviewed her for a story on the way the city affects Koori identity in the arts, and as an aside asked her thoughts on the racist riots and tensions in Sydney.

A friendly woman, her whole demeanour changed within seconds at the mention of the Cronulla race riots. Her blood seemed to boil and a quaver appeared in her otherwise confident voice. Listening back to my tape of the interview it was hard not to be affected by her obvious emotion.

“Well it’s kind of ironic, because these sort of territorial wars, if you want to call them such – territorial as opposed to terrorist,” she laughs. “Apart from absolutely abhorring it and seeing it as a direct result of our government’s aggressive pro-American, bloody, sycophantic, bullshit is….” she growls her way through the word ’sycophantic’. “The thing is you find Aboriginal people now or Aboriginal issues are just not even on the political agenda. It doesn’t even occur to anyone that Aboriginal people may have a greater claim on all of this country than Middle Eastern or the surfies or whoever these different gangs are. The ‘ethnic’ group of indigenous Australians is just completely invisible. When the election campaigns are running now, we just don’t rate a mention.”

“I think our Prime Minister saying he doesn’t accept that there’s underlying racism in Australia is just an absolute nonsense and these conflicts well demonstrate that. In a very insidious way, they’re covertly endorsed by the current government, that it’s okay to be kind of vigilante-like and attack people of other cultural traditions.”

“It’s ironic, because when you go around Australia, when you go into sort of remote areas or traditional communities and you talk to aboriginal artists and their families about the things that have happened to them personally and their lands, they’re very generous. We want to share our culture, we’re all living here now we’ve all got to get along. It’s not about wanting to kick everyone out and have Australia back to themselves, people are not like that, they say there’s good and bad in everyone.”

“Rusty Peters, who’s a fantastic artist, just said ‘You know, there’s good black fellas, there’s good white fellas, there’s bad black fellas, there’s bad white fellas’. If we could see that sort of spirit generate throughout Australia, I think that’d be a wonderful thing and I don’t think we’d see these sorts of terrible conflicts and so on.”