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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a stylus if it’s not touching the record, etc. Stylusmagazine.com’s shut down. I’m still not entirely sure why, but it’s a real loss.

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

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

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

The launches…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I fell in love with Macy Gray’s debut, On How Life Is, about eight or nine years ago.

This wasn’t just some fling, well it didn’t seem like one - after getting the CD on promo about a half a year before the proper release, I listened to it repeatedly, told everyone about it, played it constantly. Like Badu and Mary J., Gray took hip-hop and classic soul and twisted it into a simmering groove. Unlike those singers, Gray was up close and intimate, snug and comfortable, the kind of singer whose music insinuates its way into you.

With a proper release, she found her way onto the soundtrack for every party, cafe, clothes shop and bar, seemingly right around the world. And, like so many distinctive singers, her voice quickly became a prison. Her once dear voice turned cloying.

Alela Diane’s kinda new record, The Pirate’s Gospel, reminds me of Gray. Not musically - far from it. The similarity’s in the proximity you feel to her voice, the up-close intensity of listening to her sing. I say ‘kinda’ because the album came out on a self-release several years ago, and has just been rereleased, courtesy Holocene/Inertia. I think it’s essential, but you may have to hold tight for the final verdict.

A song from Alela’s album: The Rifle (courtesy of Holocene Music).

My review of The Pirate’s Gospel for Cyclic Defrost.

Cyclic 18 is out soon. In the meantime, with December dates filling fast, here’s an essential date for the diary.

That’s for coming down to the Sly Fox last night. It’s all changed around in there - now it feels more like a club space down the back, which can only be a good thing. And Silvio Mangels from Paradise Lost played a raucous disco/house set, with everyone looking up from their beers at a Blowfly tune. Here’s how I followed his set.

Panda Bear - Good Girl
KC Flightt - Planet E (Hip Hop mix)
Slaughter Mob - Saddam
Rhythm & Sound - Why (featuring Tikiman)
Nathan Fake - Long Sunny
Burial - Unite
Monkey Mafia - Ward 10
Blaze - Moonwalk
Marshall Jefferson - The House Music Anthem
Eight Miles High - 04:17
Bandalu - Lifestyle
Cappa - Cornnuts & Courvoisier
Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay/Francois Kevorkian - Snake Charmer (Reprise)

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.