Sunday, April 29, 2007

Blues Onna Sunday

Latest in series of Sunday blues-sessions, featuring Shuji Inaba, The Stumps, Tindersticks, and two from LSD March...

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Let Me Lose My Mind Gratefully

Hold onto your hat and get ready for one of the most over-the-top rock n' roll bands of all time.


Hailing from Japan, the King Brothers (Myspace page here) make it their business to somehow mash-up the elements of every vital era of rock n' roll music and then utterly demolish it. They approximate the sound of the Germs backing Howlin' Wolf -- with his hand caught in a garbage disposal unit.

Promoter Brendan writes:
Few live acts make me drop my beer. When the King Brothers played Auckland a couple of years ago they did just that and left a trail of blind worshippers in their wake, setting rock'n'roll music and anything else in their path on fire.
This incredible live act make notorious leather-stovepipe nutjob rockers Guitar Wolf seem like Scots sadcore drips Belle and Sebastian. They take the blues into primal scream territory, and in the live setting they gleefully pound your face in the resultant flaming gloop.

In support are Wellington's own excellent looney speed-rockers Knife Fight.

For better or worse, you will soon be able to divide your life in half - a time before you heard The King Brothers, and after. Oh, it's gonna be explosive. Fucking explosive. You can count on it.

THE KING BROTHERS w/ KNIFE FIGHT
THURS 3RD MAY
SAN FRANCISCO BATHHOUSE
DOORS 8PM

TICKETS AVAILABLE AT REAL GROOVY

Thursday, April 26, 2007

PC or not PC, that is the question

So is a movie clip called "White People Dancing" -- sorta Funniest Home Vids montage style, featuring a bunch of unattractive whiteys -- at weddings, socials, whatever.. some of them Irish, or maybe Polish, I'm guessing -- committing various acts of uncoordinated abominations all in the name of getting down -- just a bit of fun?

Or could it be said to be -- at best -- culturally insensitive, or even -- at worst -- contributing to the propagation of racist stereotypes?

Thursday, April 19, 2007

The Third Annual Falconhawk All Cock, All Falcon, All Party Falconcock Cocktail Party and Craft Fair Extravaganza

This is my cricket team, Falconhawk:


On Saturday night we had a cocktail party and prize-giving. Here are some pictures of proceedings:

Steve makes making cocktails on a sort-of "feeding-the-5000" scale look fun and easy.


Ozz man, at this stage still in the happy place.


David has a number of sheets to the wind.


If n is the number of sheets to the wind that David has, the number of sheets to the wind that Phil at any one time has can be expressed as n*sqrt(3).


Our gracious host Tobin, and his lovely date -- whose name I have unfortunately forgotten.


Tobin and date.


Date sans Tobin. I gave up trying to take a pic which didn't involve one or both of them looking like retards.


Tobin (at stage-right) tells another "joke".


Wicketkeeper extraordinaire and Falconhawk Man Of The Year, Dan Cumming, likes to whistle when he's drunk.


Dan Cumming also likes the feel of cold hard metal on his *cough* cheeks. At this stage I gave up trying to take a pic of Dan which didn't involve him, also, looking like a retard.


David and Shauna.


Man of the Year. 'Nuff said, innit.


Some formica.


Yes indeed.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Mighty Mighty Mighty Mighty Mighty Mighty

Where you will find me on the weekend:


More here on the Wellingtonista.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Alt.country at the Bathhouse

American alt.country legends Richard Buckner and Edith Frost are playing together at the San Francisco Bathhouse on Wednesday night.

There are three kinds of American folk artist: those who sit, contented, on a back porch contemplating America's landscape and ways; those for whom its landscape and ways are something to stand against or move boldly through; and those whose America is a shadowy, impressionistic place that moves inside of them. This [latter] is the area that the sombre-voiced Richard Buckner has been exploring since 1984 --(Sylvie Simmons; The Guardian, 2004)



Richard Buckner is the true 'American Wanderer'. The American landscape is the backdrop he moves against (literally as well as figuratively; he's been traveling the North American continent for two decades now) and his relationship to it is shifting and ambiguous, a complicated state of existing within and without a country that is impossible to escape from unscathed. He's worked alongside and recorded with Calexico, Giant Sand, Neko Case among many others, and he's been described by Howe Gelb as having "one of the finest voices on the planet".

Edith Frost walks a fine line, musically speaking, between sanity and utter madness. Since the nineties she's been taking the conventions of introspected folk and alt.country and cramming it with such kitsch oddities and childlike arrangements as occur to her along the way. Her voice is the dusty, low pitched croon you might expect of an old-time country heartbreaker, but this is a woman who also digs on Blondie and has no qualms about forcing the glaring city lights of New Wave onto the quiet country and folk roads that underpin her music. Edith featured on the Drag City super session, alongside Bill Callahan, Brendan Murphy, Rian Murphy and Jim O'Rourke.

This is a show not to be missed.

RICHARD BUCKNER, EDITH FROST + GUESTS
WEDNESDAY 18th APRIL
SAN FRANCISCO BATHHOUSE

Tickets are $25 plus booking fee, available from Slow Boat Records in Cuba Street.

Links:
MySpace pages for Richard Buckner and Edith Frost.

Friday, April 13, 2007

I will miss Kurt Vonnegut

He's popped off to the planet Tralfamadore for the last time and I will miss him. Not that I ever knew him personally, dig, but I will feel an absence, a void in the fabric of the universe -- the space which he previously inhabited. Perhaps not so much actually on a personal level, for the resonance of his work lingers on and on and on and on and so on... but more the idea that if the human race could produce such a fine fellow -- as a humanist, the ultimate collision of sadness and magnanimity -- will it ever bother to do so again? Could it, even?

And I think the world will be a poorer place -- and we will probably struggle for some time to examine ourselves as effectively -- without his intelligent, forthright sagacity.


My favourite Kurt Vonnegut moment? Encountering his drawing of an anus while reading his novel Breakfast of Champions for the first time at about age 14. It looked something like this:



Some possible reading:

Custodians of Chaos: an excerpt from his memoirs A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut's Blues For America

Salon interview and profile from 1999

Wikipedia entry

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Dead C postscript

Here's a montage-img of The Dead C playing at the City Gallery the other week:


You should click on the image for a much closer look.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Stumps vs. BBA Dukes and Postures

Post-rock is a done-to-death description but as a semaphore of intent it still serves a certain purpose. First coined by music-journo Simon Reynolds as a term to describe progressive music "using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbre and textures rather than riffs and power chords", it's use was rapidly spread during the 90s by breathless writers suddenly overwhelmed by seemingly-infinite possible music-futures. Reynolds further expounded:

perhaps the really provocative area for future development lies... in cyborg rock; not the wholehearted embrace of Techno's methodology, but some kind of interface between real time, hands-on playing and the use of digital effects and enhancement.

... which in itself has turned out to be suitably ambitious, as in general attempts at an amalgam of real-time instrumentation and digital frippery have turned out to be a big horrible mess (with notable exceptions, of course).

However some have managed to find a kinda cautious way-forward through this experimental minefield, and on Saturday night four progressive musical groups take four individual post-rockin' approaches to deconstructing sound within the codified meta-language of rock music:

...some of Wellington's greatest rock explorers...

The Postures will have you shakin' yer booty and shaking in your boots with their disco/doom rhythms combined with piercing tones and a punk delivery. The Stumps are quite possibly the Grateful Dead for the 21st century... noxious jazz-fusion is administered a good spanking to within an inch of the (current) law. Join The Dukes of Leisure on an idler's stroll through huge spaces of gentle melodies surrounded by walls of violent and engulfing noise. And Black Boned Angel is uber-ambient doom-metal created from massively overdriven instruments... the aural equivalent of a tequila and opiates-bender followed by a five-day crying jag.

SATURDAY APRIL 14th
SAN FRANCISCO BATH-HOUSE
10$

The last Black Boned Angel performance: