This will soon be a thing of the past.

I lose my records room soon - a luxury I built up to with a lot of dreaming - and in the process of preparing for that seismic shift, I’ve been culling CDs (and the odd record). Where do you go to sell CDs these days? Does anyone pay?

The line between art and architecture, and what makes urban spaces sing is something close to my heart, so I jumped at the chance to cover Concrete Culture - a show at COFA-UNSW’s Ivan Dougherty Gallery - on my show on FBI.

Richard Goodwin, one of the featured artists, is known as a sculptor, including a long run of public art on freeways. But a lot of his work, and definitely the work on show at IDG was hugely inspired by NYC artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and in some ways it is pretty subversive. With an ARC grant from the Howard Government, Goodwin mapped public spaces throughout the city: lift spaces, stairs, even the public toilets on the 37th floor of an investment bank.

Richard Goodwin at FBI

Film producer and distributor John L. Simpson was in later to talk about his film, Men’s Group - out in September - but also found time to discuss the balancing act of being in the business of art making, and making art.

Selling the show: John L. Simpson at FBI

I went to Firstdraft gallery on Wednesday night to check some emerging artists: Emma White, Tully Arnot (a student of Richard Goodwin’s, strangely enough) and The Elastic Band (Jo Cuzzi, Patsy Black and Amanda Cole).

We found time to fit in some music too:

Jungle Fever - Charlie Feathers
Thing Called Love - The Kahn Brothers
Cold Son - Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks
Serious Times - Gyptian
Tip My Canoe - Dengue Fever
Beef in a Box - Architecture In Helsinki
Hurry Up - Roman Revutski
A Love Supreme - Alice Coltrane
Make it So (feat. Michael Johnson) - Daedelus
The Suspense is Killing Me - Box 8 Bit
Karaoking - Plastic Palace Alice
Dancing on a Knife - Tennis
Ludey-do-dah - Mr Johnson’s Marching Boys
Bird - Grand Salvo
Dragonslayer - James Pants
Engine No. 999 - Western Synthetics
Lost in Low Cloud - Flying Foxes
What is a Life? - Youth Group

A lot of you regular readers are community radio presenters and producers. There aren’t too many opportunities to big up stations or presenters doing good stuff, but here’s one. The CBAA Awards will be announced at the annual CBAA conference (held in Alice Springs this year).

Categories:

• Best New Program or Content Initiative (individual programs, a programming initiative, segment, or other forms of media content, such as podcasting, blogging, magazine articles)
• Excellence in Community Participation
• Excellence in Digital Media (digital broadcasting, web streaming, podcasting, blogging, digital video, general digital media content, etc)
• Excellence in Training
• Excellence in Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasting
• Contribution to Local Music (Proudly Sponsored by APRA)
• Excellence in Music Programming (Proudly Sponsored by PPCA)
• Contribution to Indigenous Broadcasting
• Excellence in Spoken Word, News and Current Affairs Programming (Proudly Sponsored by Deutsche Welle)
• Most Innovative Outside Broadcast or Special Event Broadcast
• Best Initiative to Build Station Capacity
• Troy Garner Excellence in Sports Programming

Plenty of shows and ideas on offer at my station - FBI 94.5 in Sydney - could line up against those categories, and I’m sure at most stations around the country. Go ahead and nominate.

Lee Tran Lam keeps starting blogs. Fortunately they’re good.

To recap, one’s inspired by her FBI radio show, Local Fidelity (just one post so far). Another, more ahem mature blog - The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry - celebrates this vegetarian foodie du jour’s experiences in restaurants here and afar.

The latest one’s called Recommended Daily Intake - in Lee Tran’s words, “a blog that asks people, ‘What five things do you love, right now?’”

It would be five things that you are loving right now – could be a book, album, restaurant, magazine, article you’ve just read, etc. For example, “The Cranks Cookbook by Nadine Abensur: my desert island cookbook, if desert islands came equipped with a fully functional stove and good seasonal produce”, that sort of thing. It’s just for fun and no-big-deal and the point of it is to discover things (books/stores/films/restaurants etc) that people might not know about.

Recent inclusions include LA-based artist James Gulliver Hancock recommending Murakami’s ace New Yorker piece on running, one of my favourite bloggers (and sister of sister in laws) Beccy Joe Stuart talking bluegrass, and, most recently, me, on a bunch of things I’m currently besotted with.

Email Lee Tran (details on the page) if you want to join in.

I generally remember to take pics of my radio guests just before they walk out the door. Not today. That’s not to say they weren’t a photogenic bunch.

Super 8 film maker Louise Curham and Ensemble Offspring’s Claire Edwardes were in to talk about ‘Waiting to Turn Into Puzzles’ (Wednesday night at the Chauvel Cinema, Paddington). Plus Mike Bennett and Myles Du Chateau from new gallery Palmer Projects.

Brain - NERD
Action Figures - Cool Kids
The Hustle - Freddie Cruger
Palm Tree Ukelele - Birth Glow
Way Down to Heaven - Sian Alice Group
Untrust Us - Crystal Castles
Fun and Interesting - The Chap
Gayle - Guy Blackman
Same Suburb Different Park - Firekites
Electronic Cosmetics (feat Word2Jah) - Westernsynthetics
Just 4 Kicks - Rustie
Right Here - Sun
Nomads - Our Sleepless Forest
Looking For Water - Carl Craig presents Zoos of Berlin
Soldier’s Grin - Wolf Parade
Honky Tonk Blues - Hank Williams
Big New Prinz - The Fall
Shibuya - Soft War
Bad Blood - Ernest Ellis
Things I Did When I Was Dead - No Age

I have a lot of love for Mark Gowing’s design. That’s probably because so much of the work I’ve seen of his is packaging for records I love. Records from his Preservation label by the likes of Sun.

He designed Cyclic Defrost #8 too. Here’s Bim’s interview with the man. Here’s the magazine PDF.

Mark Gowing - Oil Kills Peace

Mark won the Ideological Posters category (the prize is split into ideological, cultural and advertising posters) in the 21st International Poster Biennale for the above poster, Oil Kills Peace.

(Thanks She Sees Red for the tip)

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.

Have I got this right? Scan to the bottom of Jon Dale’s Real Time review of the Adelaide Contemporary Music Festival and you’ll find this:

for permission to link or reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net

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

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.