Illegal Gunshot - Ragga Twins
Like An Arrow - Baobinga & ID
Ti Tree Bush Mix - Big Low
Sandshoe - Peret Mako
Wayfaring Stranger - Jamie Woon
The Escape - Early Day Miners
Out the Window With the Window - Tunng
Remember Love - Noze
The Devil’s Crayon - Wild Beasts
The Bizness - Killaqueenz
Requiem In A-Flat Reprise - Dead Leaf
Winter Coat - Hit The Jackpot
Russian Websites - The Tongue
Kiss With a Fist - Florence and the Machine
Gang Sound - Lindstrom
Met Suf I Eyrum - Sigur Ros
Bright Tomorrow - Fuck Buttons
Introduction - Natural Causes
Black Members - Deadbeat Club
Heavy Gum - Vincent Over the Sink

Can’t say I’m a Pearl Jam fan. But when Robert McDonald posted about the band recently, I felt moved to comment (here, given his blog does not allow comments).

McDonald saw Pearl Jam, who he described as, “a tight, well-practiced band that was mostly just having fun playing, coupled with good acoustics and work on the soundboard.”

All throughout the show, hundreds of digital cameras or mobile phones were taking pictures of the stage. At one point I counted, and in our section about 1 in 20 folks at any time were taking a picture. A few folks seemed to be consistently taking photos the entire time. This is extraordinarily odd if you think about it. Given the distance between most fans and the stage, and the dim lighting, most of these pictures will be a blurry mess. Moreover, one could easily find a better picture of Eddie Vedder on the web.

He gives two reasons for this. Profound: the magical thrill and emotional resonance of the Pearl Jam gig (or whatever it is) in front of you. The shallow: people proving they managed to get tickets to the gig.

I don’t entirely agree the latter is so shallow. That ephemeral moment, that magic of seeing a band perform live is coming into focus as the centre of many music makers’ activities. Blame it on the twin factors of declining record sales, and the merch. and gig (oh, ad licensing too) based replacement economy. That live experience is the thing, but how to capture it? It’s such a fleeting moment.

Photos and audio were par for the course for years. Cameras are cheaper now, video’s replaced audio, and it’s so easy to share those pics. Why’s the guy taking 50 photos, probably because as McDonald said, “most of these pictures will be a blurry mess.” At such a bad signal to noise ratio, dude’s just trying to up his/her chance of taking a decent one.

Speaking of which, check my pics of Justin Townes Earle, Jamie Lidell, and The Herd at my flickr page.

What can’t hip hop do?

Here’s Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and all round amazing novelist of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, talking to Virginia Trioli.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Is it true you wrote some of this listening to rap music?

JUNOT DIAZ: Embarrassingly, I wrote it all listening to hip-hop.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: Really?

JUNOT DIAZ: Yeah. I drive my girl crazy.

VIRGINIA TRIOLI: You had it in your ears while you figured it out?

JUNOT DIAZ: Yeah. Play music loud enough so your neighbours call the police and hope the words come.

See the rest here.

I was down about missing Diaz - though being in the USA more than made up for that - but I’ve been loving all the second hand reports from sightings around town.

Watching Jamie Lidell on stage it’s all too easy to see his thing as one gigantic piss-take.

The crazy outfits, the big soul numbers. He was dressed in Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat the first time I saw him, in early 2004 at the Sydney Festival bar. He’s got a band now, and at the Bowery on NY’s Lower East Side last weekend, they opened with an explosive version of ‘Another Day’ from new record Jim. Read the record reviews and you’ll see names like Marvin and Otis and Sly and Prince - it often feels he’s tilting an ironic brow to those guys, but it wasn’t always that way. Lidell was an IDM demigod, a hero among Wire critics - Super Collider, ‘media suits’ made from videos, CDs and 16mm film - so his 2006 blue-eyed soul record, Multiply, was something of a surprise.

A couple of years earlier I saw the beginnings of that record at the show in Sydney. I could not stop talking about it. I was blown away to the point that it left an embarrassingly black mark on my name. Lidell took risks. Along the way, his music alienated much of the audience, a crowd attracted by the promoter’s brand of smooth deep house rather than its headliner. Lidell’s live loops and heavily layered performance have since been co-opted by the likes of Final Fantasy and Dan Deacon, though their approach differs from Lidell’s uninhibited blast of the thrill of being there, playing live.

Back to that black mark. A Sydney DJ came to play at a party I organised in Canberra later in ‘06. I picked the DJ up from the airport, and he proudly shoved a demo CD in the player. It was works-in-progress from Multiply. I kept listening when he got out of the car at the hotel, and - to my eternal shame - ripped the disc. I was that excited. Thrilled, even, to hear this guy again. The recorded set was good, too, packed with messy, unmastered jams and Lidell’s playful voice.

A while later, Multiply appeared. Hints of those early performances remained, there were some decent songs too, but musically it was flattened. The spikes and mistakes replaced by grooves and polish. Like a turntablist, his thing struggled on disc. Jim, his latest, appeared this year. But I’d lost interest and only went along to the Bowery show because friends wanted to go.

Flaunting a spray-on beard, dark glasses, embroidered jacket and stripy pants, Lidell stepped out with a full band, including a bearded sax blower in a smoking jacket (and not much else). It was a skronking, funked up jam, taking in 12 songs and both records. The band took a break halfway, leaving Lidell space for a 20 minute knob-twiddling, tumbling beats jam that culminated in an extended version of ‘When I Come Back Around’.

Lidell’s voice is not of the calibre of the artists he emulates - it’s rawer, not quite as versatile - and his songs don’t hit the same heights either. But the thing you need to understand with the guy, the thing I’m beginning to understand, is that all that stuff isn’t the point. The point is the performance. And his band - part Muppets, part Zapp - has a by-the-seat-of-the-pants joie de vivre that’s exhilarating, contagious, and seeing Lidell just makes me want to see him again.

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

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

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

I don’t like Daft Punk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m crossing my fingers very tightly I’ll get however many boxes of Cyclics back from the printers before the launch on Thursday night. I’m quietly confident.

Pretty post rock (Underlapper) and classic ’90s electronic sounds (Robert Luke). Check. Glitchy/dusty techno/IDM (Aluf). Check. And new demos and other sounds (me). All bases covered. It’s $12 from 8 ’til 11:30pm at the Sound Lounge (downstairs at the Seymour Centre in Chippendale).

I’m playing records at the Tilbury hotel in Wooloomooloo (Nicholson St) tomorrow night. It’s a Future Classic thing, Nathan McLay’s playing from three until six, then I’m playing ’til 9pm. Free entry, etc. You should come.

Cyclic Defrost #19 guest cover designer, maker of lovely music, and little beknown to me DJ of some repute Dylan Martorell played this set at a Melbourne night called Collectors Set.

It’s a musical free for all as you’d imagine from the Snawklor/Hi God People music maker.

I drove out to Auburn last night to a soundtrack of new songs from the Herd. First cut ‘The King Is Dead’ really resonates, with the refrain: “We danced like New Year’s Eve”.

I may never forget wandering into the Bat & Ball, Surry Hills, to hear Underlapper playing as the election tally turned against Howard last year. Here’s what I wrote the day after:

The prospect of those guys in power for another term had left 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.

I haven’t played Poleconomy yet, can’t even think where it is. But the sense of exhausted joie de vivre that night: dancing, drinking champagne, making new friends. There was a sense of a weight being lifted off our shoulders, the possibility of another way forward. And for all the criticisms of the Rudd Government’s first few months, they’ve made some very significant steps.

Dancing like new year’s eve - so apt - and those things come through in the song. Another Herd record that promises to continue their career growth. It’s out in May, and (thanks to Ryan from Everything at Once for connecting the dots on this) Jane Tyrrell has another thing on the go, with her group Firekites newly signed to Spunk.