With Massive Attack’s “Collected,” we needed to find a symbol that encapsulated or conveyed the emotions and ideals of the band. With it being a “Best of,” a more obvious route would have been to utilise their trademark flame in some way. So instead we thought, a nicer way to approach the cover was to adopt a technique that we’d used before on their other album “Mezzanine:” a collage or composite of different elements, but applied to a new set of images. Working with Nick Knight, we took a still life of roses as the core element and introduced other layers over the top. When you first look at the rose, you see this very beautiful flower, or group of flowers. However on closer inspection, all these other hidden layers are revealed.

Tom Houston talking to Japan’s Ping mag about designing CD covers for Massive Attack, as well as Nick Cave, Gnarls Barkley and others.

Brisbane John Doyle lookalike Robert Forster played a gorgeous set in Sydney in August, mostly from his latest record The Evangelist. As usual ‘Surfing Magazines’ got a once over too. He’s been in the states ever since, reprising his Velvet Underground covers set as well as touring the new record.

Forster played a show at super intimate Joe’s Pub, and nyctaper got it direct from the sound board.

It’s spring, but it feels like summer. It was winter when Richard Macfarlane hit me with this meme. The months have raced.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your Spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Wildly emotional music always gets me, but I’m increasingly loving music that’s more three dimensional: knees up, head down. And at least the first few in this list of seven songs driving me wild right now are those kind of songs.

Nina Simone - ‘Strange Fruit’
Ms N. Simone’s voice is rough, sweet, tortured and beautiful in pretty much equal measure, like the woman. She’s so special we named our little girl after her. I’ve been listening to her albums over and over recently. And although a friend just gave me her wonderful 1959 live recording at New York’s Town Hall, an album so thick with mood it wraps around your ears like caramel, it’s her intense ‘Strange Fruit’ that never leaves me.

She’s ferocious and raw and honest and, more than anything, alive.

(Well said Big Stereo)

Tricky - ‘Council Estate’ (South Rakkas Crew remix)
A little while after my daughter began to kick down her walls, her mother’s stomach, Tricky released this record. “In my mother’s belly and I’m starting to kick.” It’s a Tricky life story… paranoia, superstar aspirations, pop hooks. In other words, vintage Tricky Kid, which might not be such a big deal if you’d only heard his first couple of albums (Maxinquaye, Pre-Millenial Tension), but is pretty amazing in the light of disappointing recent records (including Blowback with Ed Kowalczyk from Live). Desperate for a fading fame? Whatever inspired his return, the original is good, but the South Rakkas Crew’s soca-fied and time-stretched dancehall version is pure symbiosis.

Justin Townes Earle - ‘The Good Life’
I was in New York City a few months ago and saw in Time Out that a guy with Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt’s names was playing a show. I’d never heard of him before, but he’s named after Townes, and son of Steve, and I figured that was enough. Not sure what I was expecting, but he was much better. We’re talking rockabilly, country, the blues, or as Justin calls it, “mostly love songs and train songs.” I might save my other comments for a review, as I just discovered he’s touring Australia in November. If he’s half as good as the gig we saw in the National Public Theatre’s tiny side room (capacity around 20-30), you’ll be hearing a lot more.

Eilen Jewell - ‘Rich Man’s World’
This rollicking bluegrass and country pop record found its way to me a month or two ago. Along with Alela Diane’s The Pirate’s Gospel, it’s my kind of easy listening. Friends over, barbeque listening; Sunday afternoon listening (or morning if you’ve been tuned into my radio show).

The Rectifiers - ‘Climbing Giant Numbers’
I was obsessed by ’60s pop and admittedly very twee indie pop when I was at uni. I worked up the street at a record shop in Newtown, and devoured records every day in a circuit of record shops that would generally involve large piles of vinyl and pretty significant amounts of time listening. Around then, I got a spectacular compilation of new French music makers called Source Lab 2 - featuring, among others, Daft Punk, Dimitri From Paris, Alex Gopher, Doctor L - but the most astounding thing on the record was a sedate piece that spun in ’50s exotica and warm proto trip hop, Air’s ‘Casanova 70′. ‘Sexy Boy’ followed soon after, soundtracking far too many hairdressers and cafes, but their thing was pretty amazing. In the past couple of months, I’ve been listening to the third record from Melbourne’s Rectifiers. And it has a similar vibe. Air with a bit of another Australian group, Sun. Hard to choose a favourite track as the whole album is so easy on the ears, flowing by in a softly optimistic, blissed out blur.

Charge Group - ‘Lunar Module’
I could understand someone writing this off as bloated and slow. It’s definitely a ponderous thing and I’ve probably written off many great bands like that. Fortunately, I saw Charge Group play a lot of these songs at Sydney gallery and warehouse gigs over the past year or two, and was well and truly primed for their album. The band is basically old Sydney outfit Purplene: Matt Blackman, Matt Rossetti and Adam Jesson; plus Bree Van Reyk and Jason Tampake. This is really tugging the heart strings stuff, bleak, blanched and captivating. But while it touches on moods you might find elsewhere, Matt’s voice is so Australian and so earthy it’s almost jarring.

Micah P. Hinson - ‘Tell Me It Ain’t So’
Every now and again a song sends tingles all across my skin. There are probably a quantifiable group of variables responsible, some combination of words and sounds, but I don’t care, I love those songs, and this is one. I heard it on the radio for a while before I got a copy, and every single time I hear it, my skin goes crazy. The forlorn “constantly, craving what isn’t mine” could be a riposte to the K.D. Lang song, or it might not be. It’s Americana with a crossover of folk, blues and country, but like so much great music, it’s also just Micah P. Hinson.

Back at you Macfarlane - you’re ages away in the UK blogging for tinymixtapes so you must be hearing some very fresh sounds - also, Rozie, Lee Tran, Andy Ramadge, Chris, Matt, Bec Paton and Everything At Once.

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).