Mega-hyped, but does he live up to it? Yeah no in the Aussie colloquial. I interviewed Jackson a month or so ago and the resulting Q&A discourse on subverting the dominant paradigm through a rigourous program of prickly beats is up now at the wonderful Speakers Push The Air.

In my review of Norway’s Oya Festival I said: “A whole other crowd of Norwegian bands - Shining, the Thing, Cloroform - trained in jazz, but grew up with metal and electronic music. On stage, at various points over the weekend, they flip jazz on its head, tearing through sets that have as much to do with the Sonics, Pantera, and Squarepusher as Ornette Coleman. The ex-Jaga Jazzist members of Shining play something that’s equally jazz and metal, with a bit of electronics, but if I’m to be honest, it’s really progressive rock. There I’ve said it, they play the much maligned sound, but it doesn’t sound fatty or over the top, when it connects, it is hot. Frontman Jorgen Munkeby says to the crowd: ‘This is our last show in Norway for a while, we’ll be touring Europe. And looking out at all you pretty girls, we’re sad, because it’ll just be nerdy guys in Europe.’”

Read my (very long) interview with the Norwegian band at Cyclic Defrost. Like their music, it jumps around from idea to idea, and goes on for a hell of a lot of words, but that’s part of the beauty of a Q&A and the band had a lot to say. If you’re not down for that however, I’ll be writing it up as a shorter feature interview for the next Cyclic Defrost print magazine.

If you have no idea what/who they are, go to your local good record shop or download hub and have a listen, or go to Shining’s website and have a listen.

It’s been a quiet week here. Apologies, I’ve been temping at a Sydney paper writing and subbing, with any luck they’ll give me a job. Anyway, I wrote a couple of pieces last weekend for 3D World, so here are the links.

Jazzanova have a new set of remixes out and I got to chat with Jurgen von Knoblauch about it. As always only a fraction of the interview made it into the story, there’s only so much you can say in 500 words, I’ll have to get into gear and put up some of these Q&As before too long. Since leaving Compost to set up their own Sonarkollektiv label, they’ve gone from strength to strength, though they haven’t had huge amounts of time to work with. Of the 11 remixes they’ve released since then, my favourite is the rerub of Calexico’s Black Heart, a beautiful meeting of Jazzanova’s stuttery syncopated hip hop and Calexico’s wonderfully rich Tex-Mex indie.

Ewan Pearson was a pleasure to chat with too. Refreshingly articulate, interesting and modest about his achievements. I’ve been a fan of his stuff since the early Maas releases on Soma, but his remixes over the past few years have been particularly special. He was also one of the authors of Discographies, an academic take on dance music’s social impacts. He’s left the university now, but he covers his favourite 10 or so records every week at his blog Enthusiasms.

“Four minutes into the ecstatic rush of soft focus drum’n’bass on “Montecore”, everything stops, just like the moment in a fireworks shower when the explosions of light and sound stop and you think, “Is that it?” All of sudden there’s another explosion and you’re right back in the middle of the show.”

Six years in the making, Pivot took a long time on their debut album – Seb Chan from Cyclic Defrost says he went through a pile of old CDs the other day and found at least four previously demoed versions of the album. It’s easy to see why considering the five members collaborate so widely it sometimes feels like a super-group (even though Pivot came first) recording as Triosk for Leaf, collaborating with Jan Jelinek for ~Scape and traveling through Europe in Burnt Friedman and Uwe Schmidt’s group Flanger.

And people love the album, which was released on Melbourne’s Sensory Projects, the national broadcaster Triple J has even nominated it for the inaugural J Award (shaping up to be a pretty decent shortlist). Their usual comparison is Tortoise, but dropping names like Squarepusher, DJ Shadow and John Tejada’s I Am Not A Gun might give you a good idea of their sound too. I said in my review of the record that: “Describing electronic music as a soundtrack is so ’95, but the images evoked by Pivot’s music are impossible to ignore. I can almost see it on the movie screen: sick-in-the-head lead character who you’ve come to understand, even like, but he’s spiraling out of control, hitting out and desperate for understanding.”

Richard Pike was cool enough to take some time out from touring Europe with Flanger to answer my questions.

You took your time with the debut album for Pivot, are you happy with the results?
Yes. Good things take time. We didn’t want to do a ‘nice’ album. We spent years developing what we do as a band, because we wanted to make music that sounds unique and singular. I feel like not many people do this in Australia. Everyone just wants to get a CD out before they turn 23.

Can you give me a run-through of the various projects/bands/collabs you’re involved in?
Pivot, Flanger, Gold Mice. I also co-produce Triosk.
At the moment I’m touring with Flanger in Europe. Myself and Laurence (my brother in Pivot) collaborated on Flanger’s 4th album ‘Spirituals’. Via mail and internet. Flanger is an electronic duo, of Burnt Friedman and Atom Heart, and I’m the first singer to record with this project. Which is pretty exciting. Flanger influenced Pivot when we first started, before I ever met them.
I met Burnt through Pivot. We played a gig together in Sydney and started collaborating.
I help produce Triosk, which has Pivot members Laurence and Adrian. With this group I edit and shape their music, that they write as a trio. So I have a very different role there.
Gold Mice is a new group I am working on. Nothing released yet.

It’s probably confusing to someone who listens to only Coldplay and inevitably will ask why don’t you do one band? Which one do you like the best?

How do you work in Pivot? in Triosk? Is there much overlap between your different groups and all the other collaborations? How do tracks/songs develop?
Essentially they are similar, but Triosk is a lot more conceptual in process. I just help them shape it into a releasable album, and add some tricks, computer production. I do the same thing with Pivot, but our process is based around the 5 piece creating together and a lot of post-production. By that I mean a lot more structuring and album producing in a traditional pop/rock producer sense. The band needs a producer to make the music solid. That’s my job.
Of course there is overlap. You hear it in the music. How we develop the songs is just a matter of working on it till it sounds good, and fits the vision.

How naturally do the electronic elements fit into your music? As musicians, do you find it difficult to improvise with electronics for example?
Not at all. We just work until it sounds good. We love those sounds. It would only be difficult if we didn’t like those sounds.
But I’m rarely happy with a piece of programming straight away. I spend a lot of time on particular sounds.

I find Montecore stuck in my head all the time, tell me about your scales addiction?
Scales addiction? I love melody. Montecore was a melody that came into my head, the same way the Beatles wrote songs. It’s just a simple pop melody, that you can meow meow meow along to.

Do you feel part of a music community in Sydney or a wider Australian or international one?
Playing overseas I feel the world is smaller than you think. Pivot is not distributed OS yet, but that will come next I hope.
But Sydney is a tiny scene really. And Australia not that much bigger. All bookers, musos and managers know each other. I feel part of both Australia and OS now, even though the music I make is so underground.

I interviewed Jorgen Munkeby from Shining/Jaga Jazzist a few weeks ago and he couldn’t stop saying how important his musical training is for the music he makes, how important is musical training to the music you make?
Well, with Jaga Jazzist, of course, that music needs training and discipline. I feel the opposite. I think the more you learn the more convoluted things become. I never wanted to be just a technician. That’s boring music. I’ll leave that to Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen.

Is there anything you’re trying to convey in your music?
I always say this: the balance between past and future, analog and digital, good and evil. An ongoing battle high on a mountain, a place I like to call Danger Mountain. I have a very distinct idea of what I want it to say. But it is purely musical. Music can never describe anything directly but itself.

What do you think of the small label scene in Australia? In your opinion, how is that scene being affected by filesharing and the Internet?
There is a very very small label scene. The majors are small labels now. Ringtones are the new hit singles, and music writing will adapt to that. If you wanna make money you’ve got to play gigs. Or write a great ringtone.

Pivot are back in Sydney and playing this Sunday night at the Abercrombie Hotel (corner of Abercrombie Street and Broadway in the city). Melbourne’s Mountains In The Sky are supporting, plus Levins and I will be playing records between bands.

A couple more interviews. Both bands mine the past, but where Broadcast create a new sound inspired by bands like the United States of America and Esquivel, Breakestra strictly recreate the ’60s funk of bands like The Meters. I love funk, but it’s increasingly easy to find those original records, I wanna hear new bands making something individual.

Anyway, poor indie kids Broadcast have a new album, Tender Buttons, out through Warp. It’s great, though I suspect if they don’t have some financial windfall soon, they’ll pack up the shop. Check my interviews with Broadcast and Breakestra for 3D World.

Me on Jackson (French producer who’s just dropped a killer glitch-out bomb on Warp), Cage (hip hop head who just dropped a new record on Def Jux), Aaron Phiri from Hearin’ Aid and Raw Fusion in Sweden.

I’ll probably run the Q&As somewhere else before too long too, there’s lots more goodness that wouldn’t fit into a 500 worder for 3D World in Sydney…

I just posted an interview I did earlier in the week with Tony Simon (aka Blockhead) at the Cyclic blog. It’s just a Q & A at the moment, but I’ll write it up properly for the next issue of the magazine. There are also a couple of links to downloads of Blockhead mixes and videos.

Also, you should check out Nick Guttah’s long interview with Barry Lynn (aka Boxcutter) at Gutterbreakz. Now producing jazz and IDM-influenced dubstep and grime, he grew up on Robert Fripp and Jimi Hendrix.

Thaddeus Herrmann runs the brilliant City Centre Offices label, he records under a handful of aliases and edits Berlin’s (and probably one of the world’s) best street press (De:Bug), so no wonder he was the first person I got in touch with when I visited Berlin earlier this year.

I originally wrote up an article for Spinach 7’s Soundplay, but that seems to have stalled, so my interview with Thaddi is now feeling quite at home with the charming guys at Speakers Push The Air.

Perhaps more than any other style of music, grime and dubstep have taken advantage, or taken the interest of cyber networks and internet denizens. Although plenty of the prose gets lost in detailed sociological critique or scene squabbles, a few get past that with tight commentary and (for those of us not on the East London pulse) an in to the limited run, super-limited availability dubplate culture with MP3 downloads.

36 year old Bristolian Nick Edwards runs one of the more enjoyable - Gutterbreakz. He’s not as immersed in grime/dubstep as some, but I find his eclectic take on it all more interesting than most of the purist bloggers. Originally a text blog, in recent months he’s made the shift to hosting dirty new breakbeat tracks and the odd mix set.

I’ve been keen to see just what makes people host MP3 music files for general access when it seems the mainstream record industry is so righteously against it. And alongside my recent interviews with Jace Clayton (DJ/Rupture) and Stuart Buchanan (Fat Planet), Edwards is focused on a niche sound, but his approach seems indicative of a wider pattern and it seemed like another corner of the puzzle.

Why did you start your blog and what did you hope to get out of it?

Don’t know exactly. Just inspired by other people doing it and thought I’d have a go. It’s a way to record all those random thoughts and feelings I get from music that I wouldn’t normally have an outlet to express. I started in August 2003, but the first year was kind of aimless. I didn’t really find my ‘direction’ until last year.

What decisions do you make when you’re thinking of hosting a song?

It depends. If it’s older material, especially forgotten/out of print stuff then I just go for it. With new releases I’m more careful. I’ve started ripping tracks at 96kbps - I don’t want the quality too high, because I don’t want to give away other people’s music. Or I might just host a two minute clip. I want to inspire people to buy the music that I think is good, rather than giving it away. Hosting mixes is another good way of getting people into good music without giving away full tracks. I’ve also started my Gutterbreakz FM thing, where I play all the music I’m currently into at 64kbps, with me chatting over the top.

What sort of feedback do you get? From public, labels, artists?

Generally favourable so far! Quite a few people leave comments at the blog or send me e-mails. It’s mainly other music fans, but occasionally artists or labels with get in touch. I have built up quite a few contacts from this.

How many unique visitors do you get to the site? How many return?

Around 10,000 a month. I think I have quite a few regular visitors, but I don’t monitor that too closely.

What’s the bandwidth like? Does it cost you a lot to keep the site up? Do you host your own music or just link to others?

Generally shifting between 50-70 gb a month. It costs me to have the server space to host the MP3s, but it’s pretty cheap. I almost always host myself, but will sometimes link to others, with acknowledgements.

What do you think about file-sharing, P2P and so on?

Having been a big P2P user in the past, I’ve now stopped completely. It is a good way to hear new music, but I don’t think it helps anyone in the industry particularly. Not that I care about the well being of the major labels - if they all went bankrupt tomorrow I wouldn’t give a damn. But if you’re into underground innovative music, you’ve got to support it by buying the releases, because these people are on the breadline. Actually P2P can still be good for getting hold of hard to find deleted/unreleased stuff, but I found that I wasn’t really listening to a lot of the stuff I was downloading - without having made a financial commitment you just take it for granted and your iPod gets full of MP3s you never get around to playing. You end up hoarding more music then you have time to listen to. Now I prefer to buy selectively and really appreciate the music.

(Check Nick Southall’s recent piece for Stylus on this topic.)

What do you think of the recent case in Australia, where mp3s4free.net went down for linking to music hosted elsewhere? Do you see any precedent for MP3 blogs in general?

Well it’s gonna happen. I’ve already seen an example of an MP3 blog being threatened with legal action. It’s only a matter of time before the big crackdown. Certain blogs like mine probably won’t be affected for a while because we’re not sharing the sort of music that the big publishers are concerned with. I’m pretty much out of the loop for now.

What do you think of the impact of technology on the music industry? Do you think it is set for a shakeup? Or will the current players get everything under control?

They always regain control. Power breeds more power. Enjoy the freedom while it lasts.

What do you think are the biggest issues at the moment?

I dunno really. I’m not on a crusade or anything. I just wanna get people into good music that they might not get a chance to hear otherwise. I’ll be interested to see how well the CD format holds up against downloads. I think its days might be numbered.

Are there any really radical options being put forward?

From my point of view (ie underground) there are two main options. Unsigned artists who just want people to hear their shit will be able to share it around easily enough on the Internet. I give loads of my own music away. There’s quite few netlabels (eg Tokyo Dawn) that offer the music completely free. It’s accepted now that none of us will make a living out of it anyway, so why not? Some people choose to go to the expense of releasing their music on vinyl, which is great - and if you like the tunes, go buy the record. What the mainstream industry chooses to do is their business. I really couldn’t give a shit.

Aside from the blog, what else do you do? Do you write elsewhere?

I have no professional involvement with the music industry. I work a normal job. Blogging is my hobby, along with DJing and making my own music. I sometimes guest at another blog, but that’s about it. I don’t really have any aspirations to write anywhere else. I’m quite happy where I am.

Listen to Guttah’s mixes and net radio segments at Bleepfiend, check him championing bleep’n'bass and chatting about everything from Fennesz to DJ Maxximus to Tricky Disco at the Guttah.

Ripping its way around the net several years ago, the Gold Teeth Thief mix was the first challenger to Coldcut’s 70 Minutes of Madness crown and its raucous melange reacted fiercely against the fake rules of DJing, the artificial boundaries saying what music you can/can’t play in different environments and how to put that music together. But unlike Coldcut’s studio-recorded set, Rupture recorded his live on three turntables.

Like a few of my favourite DJs – Optimo, Mark N, Bec Paton, Glimmer Twins, even Certified Bananas – he sits somewhere between Simon Reynold’s two schools of music fan, neither strictly genreist or populist, instead, right where the best DJs should be, unwrapping music.

He tears through sets, cutting up tracks he obviously loves with complete irreverence. Soaring Middle Eastern voices ride nasty basslines, Crunk anthems bump against big time pop tunes and searing junglist breakbeats play host to chatting ragga MCs, somehow it all makes a global rhythmic sense that’s a hell of a long way from your local record shop’s World Music section.

As well as DJing, recording for labels including Tigerbeat6, Soul Jazz and his own Soot Records, Rupture, real name Jace Clayton, also runs one of the best MP3 blogs around, Mudd Up!. Covering grime to favela to screw to breakcore to Moroccan chants to whatever else – and always coupled with equally incisive readable commentary. In a world of music that just keeps getting wider, he’s becoming one of my favourite filters on it all. He’s been interviewed about music plenty of times, so I bounced him a handful of questions about technology, music and the future.

What decisions do you make when you’re thinking of hosting a song?

It has to be quality of course, and it also has to be useful – something that is not already digitized and floating around. 90% of the time, I only host music I own, and as far as I know, it’s music that tends not to be ripped - from vinyl, cassettes, CDs – it’s cool that blogs post mainstream commercial tunes that you can readily find on P2P networks, but Mudd Up! is more like … decentertainment. I like posting amazing songs by bands or artists people haven’t really heard of or are hard to get even for fans, like rips of expensive grime 12″s, or gems from African CD-Rs I get from Moroccan and Senegalese shops here in Spain. Part of the whole point is that hotness is everywhere, not just in the handful of tightly controlled music labels and media outlets who spend money to create demand.

What sort of feedback do you get?

Most people just download and don’t say anything! The public and artists who read regularly appreciate it though, I do get thank-you emails, often as basic as ‘thanks for posting this kind of music, it’s so hard to learn about where I live’. Plus folks understand that I’m sharing music I like & writing about it and all for free.

What do you think of the recent case in Australia, where mp3s4free.net went down for linking to music hosted elsewhere? Do you see any precedent for MP3 blogs in general?

That is completely absurd, both in terms of moral standards and ideological reasoning, and in terms of possibilities for enforcement. Making links to free music hosted in other countries illegal on Australian sites is like arresting fish for being wet.

Precedents, of course. Radio itself: it’s a freely accessible technology that allows people to broadcast & talk about music and lets people at home copy what they like. (the fact that taping from radio is seen as legal fair use, and mp3 copying is viewed as piracy is ludicrous– the legality of identical acts changes with the fidelity of the medium) of course radio’s structure is one transmitter and thousands of receivers: it’s free culture, but its top-down, controlled. Blogs spring up like weeds, their architecture is much closer to the P2P standard of thousands of transmitters and thousands of receivers.

What do you think of the impact of technology on the music industry? Do you think it is set for a shakeup? Or will the current players get everything under control?

What do you mean by ‘current players’? The music industry is a strange ecology populated by the audience/consumers, artists and producers, and incredibly dense layers of lawyers and distributors and managers and bureaucracy and whatnot in between.

Will fans keep on sharing and talking about music they love? yes.

Will labels keep trying to force a rapidly-aging business plan using legal arm-wringing? yes.

What do you think are the biggest issues at the moment?

Structural equality in the developing world. Access to drinkable water. AIDS in Africa… Oh you mean music? heh-heh. The big issue is no big issues.

Don’t get it twisted: MP3s and legality is not a big issue. Labels and lawyers are trying to push that notion into the public, but it’s hardly the case. There is no piracy crisis. Now’s the best time EVER to be a music fan. We have an unprecedented wealth of choices. Now is the best time EVER to be making music: the barriers to entry are at their lowest, you can record an album with an inexpensive PC running free open source linux software. Moreover, the ease of distribution is incredible. At least 80,000 people have downloaded my Gold Teeth Thief mix, I just put it online to share it with friends and it exploded exponentially.

There is, as always, a shocking amount of misguided corporate greed, but that’s nothing new. The obvious global consensus is that official CD prices are unreasonably high. The CD industry is _aided_ by the fact that people will get free MP3s of artists they would not otherwise hear of and get excited enough to pay exorbitant prices for the full audio CD. People sharing files is what people always have done Rampant bootlegging is market forces as work. Russian, China, India, and Africa: in all these countries it is easier to find a bootleg CD than a ‘real’ ‘official’ version. That is the cutting edge. RIAA-style litigation, Australia link case-style absurdities are almost surreal approaches to stem the tide.

Are there any really radical options being put forward?

The radical, extremist options are what is regularly put forward by the major labels and organizations like America’s RIAA. Trying to stop fans from sharing excerpts of music online - free advertising, unlike the millions of payola labels give to radios each year to ensure airplay - is radical. Trying to force consumers to still feel satisfied by spending $12-20 on a shiny plastic circle is radical.

Paid downloads are ridiculous as well. All this upheaval or evolution of whatever you wanna call it just marks an emphasis back on performance, back on realtime music. It has long been the case that most large bands earn more money by Selling T-Shirts than they do be playing shows, and virtually all musicians they earn more money by playing shows than they do my selling albums.

So it’s possible for bands to sell fewer CDs now but continue to grow in popularity. Whether people are buying or downloading your music, though, if you come to town and perform a lot of those people will pay to go to the show. So eventually record labels will focus more on ‘artist management’, with a special emphasis on cutting into the tour profits– which traditionally labels do not earn money from. Yeah, I think soon, you know, to sign with Matador (a fake indie owned by a major label) you´ll have to commit to giving away a percentage of your live profit to the label; or labels will force artists to use their in-house booking agents. It’s a negative view but I think labels will rapidly realize that live performances will ALWAYS be an income source, and although that is not their territory, it will be easier for them, in the long run, to go parasitic on artists that way.

The music industry is stunningly corrupt, by the way. Much more corrupt than drug cartels, and almost as corrupt as corporate interests lobbying government officials in Washington D.C.

If you haven’t heard the Gold Teeth Thief mix, download it immediately from Negrophonic complete with a full tracklisting. Mudd Up! is equally essential, you have to check his current piece on indie acts selling out, from Dabrye, P73 and Oval to Stereolab, Alias and M.I.A.