hearcanal

Quit Demonising Consumers - Let The Advertisers Pay

2012-01-30T09:42:00.003+01:00

'K, so this isn't a language-focussed post, but I couldn't resist.

There's a lot of ranting and raving about the SOPA/PIPA bills. There's also some about the international ACTA treaty (that's right, international - ACTA is a greater threat to the internet than SOPA/PIPA).

Most internet users insist that SOPA-PIPA-ACTA would be dreadful for the internet - which they would. How come entertainment companies get the power to take down websites? Most police forces don't have that power!

On the other side there are entertainment industry lawyers, lobbyists, shills, and sock puppets, who try and convince us that unlicensed copying is *liderally* the same thing as burglary, grand theft auto, and high seas piracy.

The entertainment industry was always used to overcharging for its product, but now that manufacturing, distribution, and marketing costs have plummeted to near-zero, they've found that consumers have become accustomed to not paying.

There is, of course, a group that is perfectly willing to pay for entertainment, and they don't even watch it. I'm not talking about generous grandparents. I'm talking, of course, about advertisers.

Advertisers make services like Spotify and Hulu possible. Hideously complicated licensing situations then make sure that not every country can enjoy these excellent services.

So advertisers do what consumers do. They go to file lockers and torrent sites and all that bizness. You have to admire the ingenuity of the engineers that make those sites work. You also should feel a modicum of distaste when you realise that lifelong shysters like Kim Dotcom are the ones profiting from sites like Megaupload.

Check the banner ads on file locker sites, and you find not just the usual array of Ukrainian brides and free iPads. You also find banners for high street banks like SNS (Netherlands), leading poker and betting sites like PKR and William Hill. There's even one here for Cilit Bang.

Of course, the advertisers don't place these banners directly. There will be three or four agencies and go-betweens responsible for putting Volkswagen on Gorillavid. But the principle is there - advertisers are willing to pay money for entertainment to be hosted. Consumers are no longer willing to pay over the odds for their entertainment.

So instead of spending all that time and money lobbying for hideous initiatives like SOPA-PIPA-ACTA, why don't the TV and movie studios work out how to make Hulu available outside of the US? Why don't the record labels give more support to Spotify and other startups?

It can't be greed, can it? The fact that the entertainment industry is bloated and often overpaid (especially its stars) and feels cheapened by micropayments?

Impossible Sounds

2012-01-24T09:00:00.001+01:00

"Altogether now. Eeeeeuuuuuuggghhhhhhhhoooooiiiiiii..."

A crucial part of language learning is getting the hang of the individual sounds. (Ya don't say.) Accent helps unlock prosody, the rhythm and patterns of speech. Sometimes this is obvious, like with the Spanish lisp and 'b-for-v': cerveza becoming something like "therbaytha".

Learning Dutch as an English speaker, there's not too much to worry about. The guttural g- (gaan, goes) is the biggie. Sitting in a similar realm of throat-clearing to Scottish loch and German ich, it's an integral part of Dutch and should be sprayed around with casual abandon. Words that start and end with a g are particularly satisfying: geweldig! (Great!)

But you do realise how lax an attitude we English-speakers have towards vowels. The Dutch diphthong -ui- resembles English -ow-. Bruin = brown, huis = house. But I still have trouble making the word tuin (garden) clear to Dutchies. The ui sound is a little more delicate than the broad British English ow, the sides of the mouth are kept tighter.

But that's pretty manageable. Those crazy Swedes, however, have an inventory of vowel sounds that are much trickier.

a / e / i / o / u all come pretty much in the form you generally find them in Europe (English ah / ay / ee / o / oo), with a flat, round Northern feel. Though it seems a little odd that e and o are almost doubled up, to something like e-e and o-o. Then it gets weird.

y is in the ballpark of the French rue, but with more rounded and protruded lips.

å is oa but often sounds like saw.

ä is between hair and carry.

ö is sort of a euhh thing. A long schwa, basically. Who gave that sound its own letter?!

The vowels aren't the hardest sound in Swedish. The language boasts a sound with the incredible name of voiceless palatal-velar fricative, though even that's a matter of debate. Anyone for "voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar fricative"?

What does it sound like? It's a whisper at the back of the throat, a constriction of air at the back of the tongue. It's kind of like that Dutch g-, or the German ich, though much higher. It's a pain in the ass, is what it is.

And they use it all the time. Sju, the number 7. Skit bra, "shit good" or "awesome". Stjärna, "star". Oh that's right, the sje-sound has somewhere between 22 and 50(!) different spellings.

So no, I don't have that sound down pat. I read somewhere that its closest cousin in English is the exclamation "phew". For the moment I just make like I'm blowing out candles on a cake.

Short Fiction: Fuck Perspective

2012-01-21T10:00:00.000+01:00

Ran into Tony Dope last week at the FuckPerspective opening. We calls him Dope, but he's a sharp dude. Always got theskinny on some dark dealings. And not that TMZ, Heat Magazine, Holy Molynonsense. Tony Dope's dope is for reals.

He was chugging a Desperadoand checking out some art when I saw him.

"Alright Tone," Isays.

"'Sup, youfucker," he says. "What the fuck you doing here?"

"Fuck knows," Isays. We look at the art, this bunch of dolls' heads all melted down into alittle mountain. There's a Barbie head on top, hair died green, melted at theneck so it looks like she's got a double chin.

We shoot the shit for abit, I tells him about Udo and Frank and Janey J. He says he thought Janey wasstill putting on those club nights, but no I says, she's promoting gigs now.Proper bands with guitars gigs, she got bored of all that fake club scenebullshit.

"It's all bullshit inthe end," says Tony, and he's right as usual. We grab two more beers froma girl in a panda costume and head into the next room. It's dark in there,weirdly dark, and there's this low sort of buzz coming from all around.

"Peaceful," Isays.

"Yeah," saysTony, and I can hear him swig from his bottle. "So peaceful it's almostviolent."

I nod.

"Here, you know who Isaw last week?"

"Who?" I rilly dunno.Knowing the Dopester it could be anyone.

"Charlie," hesays. "Charles Montreat."

"Montreet?"

"Montréât,"he says. "The Marquis."

"The posh dude."

"That's him. His daddied last year, innit. But we was out on the lash last week, and Charlie getsall liquored up, and you'll never guess what he tells me."

Tony Dope's voice trailedoff, and I twigged he must be heading to the next room. I headed towards thelittle green light for the exit. The next room is just paintings, but we givethem a scan.

"So before Charlie'sdad died, he gave him the key to his bureau. Charlie goes down, he opens it up,and he finds these thick manila folders. They're stuffed with photos of allthese sixties models – not girls in their 60's, I mean Twiggy, Shrimpton,Pattie Boyd. And get this, they're all naked."

"Yeah," I says,"I reckon I've seen Twiggy's tits." Like always, Tony's building upto something juicy, but it don't do to let him know you're impressed.

"Nah mate," hesays, "not like this you ain't. These are proper saucy pics. Classythough. David Bailey shot them. That's not the good bit."

I take a slug from myDesperado, that foul tequila-tasting beer, and Tony Dope tells me while I stareat one of the pictures, this really cool oil painting of the Lego Harry Potter.

Apparently Charlie askedhis dad about the pictures, and the old man fills him in about this scam heused to run in the sixties and seventies. Being a Marquis, he got himself alongto all these official functions, royal visits and all that bollocks. He'd pickhis mark – a Prince or President or something, they had to be high profile.Ambassadors weren't up to scratch. When the mark was alone, the old Marquiswould sidle over and give him a quick peek at the pictures. He'd tell the markhe could set up a little late-night rendezvous with the model. For a fee, ofcourse, but all in the strictest secrecy. They'd set up a time, and the Marquiswould send some dogsbody to collect the money. The Marquis's estate had beenpissed up the wall, so he had to earn a crust somehow.

"Fucking A," Isays.

But the model would nevershow up. The Marquis started off by sending some prossie from Soho to go downthere, but they often got a beating, and one of them never came back, so afterthat he'd just leave the mark hanging. Who they gonna complain to? Who theyeven gonna tell about it? They could afford to shed a hundred grand here andthere.

"Awesome," Isays.

"I'm just gettingstarted," says Tony.

The Marquis never gave hisname to the marks, just his title, and that was so obscure that the mark couldnever remember it. But the photos came from his mates in the fashion game, andyou can't keep a secret there. Most of the models were fucking outraged, ofcourse, they cut the Marquis off – but they weren't going to make a fuss whenthe material was so sensitive. The one or two girls that weren't mortifiedwanted in on the action.

"Sensible," Isays, but Tony's on a roll now.

Charlie's dad ran the gamefor the next twenty years. It wasn't always money, sometimes they gave theMarquis jewels, bond certificates. Once he picked up a yacht. After the modelsfound out, he had to split the takings fifty-fifty. But in the late eighties –with Macpherson, Crawford, Campbell – business was good. There was always a newmark, a younger prince or some freshly minted business mogul. Murdoch, thatgrubby little fucker, they stung him five times in all. Never learned.

The operation went international,and they kept having to bring in new people. The Marquis had one rule: nevertry it on with the Russians. At the same time, the snapshots were gettinghotter. Eventually, one of their front men went AWOL with a briefcase full ofpictures. Tried to blackmail them. He was hiding out in Croydon when somefeller stuck him with a shiv, told him "Kate Moss says hello".

"You're shittingme," I says.

"No word of alie," says Tony.

"So the supermodelsnever go through with it, then? The mark never gets his money's worth?"

"Never," saysTony. "Between eating disorders and junk habits, most of them haven't hada good ride in years."

In some ways it's the bestand the worst kept secret in the business. Only the top girls hear about it,but they come and they go, they try their hands at different things. Campbellwent solo, then set up her own stable. A few Hollywood actresses come on board– by now the women are running it, the Marquis is just a local coordinator. Hecan't keep up with it all, so he bows out. Too ruthless for him, in his dotage,and after what happened in Croydon he doesn't want to pass it down to Charlie.

"So what they up tonow?"

"This painting'sshit," says Tony. "They should've painted the Hermione Legoinstead."

"Yeah," I says,and we walk back to the main room, where a DJ is scratching on a couple decksfitted with old school gramophone horns.

From what Tony could workout, the business got out of control once digital cameras came out. A few otheroperators started pulling the same heist. Some IT guy in LA skipped town with ahard drive full of top notch shots, just to be alone with them crazy-beautifulimages. They found him in a Reno motel with a bullet-hole in his head.

The supermodels got outwhile they were ahead. By now it's no secret at all. Once the music industrygot involved, the whole world might as well have known. Those dozy bitchesstarted saving photos to on email, on their cameraphones, on their fuckingFacebook pages. Only a matter of time before the Russian cybermafia got involved.

"Then what?" Isays.

"Then nothing,"says Tony. "The jig is up. The Russians are putting the squeeze on anyonewho wants to keep their private snaps private. The rest are releasing thoseshots for publicity. Brings in more dough than the shakedown ever did."

"Makes youthink," I says. We've stopped in front of a mosaic of Steve Jobs, made outof smashed up bits of iPods. I stuff a wad of imported Texan chewing tobaccointo my bottom lip.

"You still on thechewy?" Tony takes a tiny silver box from his shirt pocket, and tips adose of snuff into the crook of his thumb. He sniffs.

"You wanna get on thesnuff, mate, " he says. "This is the future."

A Mixed Tongue Portfolio

2012-01-20T13:54:00.000+01:00

Tower of Babel, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530-1569)

Language classes at school - French and German - were a drag. I wasn't bad at them, but they just didn't interest me a great deal. Was I really bothered about France and Germany? At the time, they didn't seem like particularly cool places. Traveling was never high on my agenda. (Yes, I was a sedentary teenager. Still am in a lot of ways.)

For some reason, I only cottoned on to the sheer awesomeness of learning languages in my 20s, when I started in on the Spanish. It was a 3-week stint in Barcelona wot did it, over Christmas and New Year '99-'00. No, we didn't attempt Catalan (a rare practical decision there - though I'd still love to pick up a few words). I've been studying Castilian Spanish, on and off, since then.

Oddly, my Spanish has got a lot better since moving to Amsterdam. I've worked with un monton of Spanish-speaking colleagues. I've also dealt with a lot of Spanish production companies and advertising standards people. The net result is that I can have a stand-up row about image rights or imprudent behaviour, but struggle a bit when asking someone if they enjoyed their weekend...

Having discovered this swottish love of language, when I moved to Amsterdam it became a point of pride to learn Dutch. A lot of ex-pats don't have a pressing need to learn, especially those in the transitory and incredibly international advertising industry (at W+K we have usually 20-odd different nationalities on the go). When English is the dominant office tongue, and the locals speak it well too, you have to go out of your way to pick up much beyond menu vocabulary.

It seems small but wealthier European countries - e.g. Netherlands, Sweden - are very comfortable with English, at least in the bigger cities. It's the larger nations, with greater cultural self-sufficiency, where you would have more of a need to learn: Spain, Italy, Germany, France.

Which raises the question, why bother with Dutch? With only 22 million people using it as a first language, it ranks around #42 in the world's "biggest" languages. I'm unlikely to use it much when I leave the Netherlands.

That's a poor argument, though one you hear a lot. I've been here almost 6 years now, and it's been useful - even fun - to have een kleine beetje Nederlands up my sleeve.

It's also not the hardest language. The main barrier seems to be unfamiliarity - everyone knows what a French accent is like, and stoopid as it sounds, that helps when learning a language. But no-one has a good idea of what the Dutch accent is like before they come here. (Certainly not Mike Myers, though Paul Whitehouse is pretty good.)

Coming from English, Dutch is actually pretty easy. The syntax isn't too different, verbs conjugate in broadly the same way, and a lot of the vocabulary... well, what do you think zit in de boot means? (It's "sit in the boat".)

Now I'm picking up a bit of Swedish, and while it feels harder than Dutch – for the sounds alone – it's also still not too far from engelska. English and Dutch are both West Germanic tongues, and Swedish is from the North Germanic branch. Even given the fact it's a tonal language, and one that attaches definite articles to the end of a noun (mannen, "man-the", the man), it's not such a leap.

Of course, it's even more obscure than Dutch, sloping in at #88 worldwide. But it's not like Javanese (holding strong at #11) is going to be more useful to me right now.

What the Fudge?!

2012-01-18T14:31:00.000+01:00

Swearing! All us bastards fucking love that shit. It even has an evolutionary useful purpose, FYI. If used in moderation, swearing can actually reduce pain. Just ease up on the casual day-to-day expletives if you want it to help next time you stub your toe.

Language is generally a function of the higher brain (cerebral cortex), but a good swear activates some of the lower regions too namely the limbic system and basal ganglia, areas that deal respectively with emotions like aggression and fear, and impulse control. You know that hot feeling behind your ears when you do it? That's a bit of stress in your brain.

But in a second language, swearwords don't have the same emotional impact. You can throw around a joder (Spanish "fuck") or two without blushing.

For me, Spanish swearing just sounds cool: hijo de puta! (Son of a whore!)

And Swedish cusses just seem inoffensively cute: take fan or helvette, two very soft-sounding versions of "fuck".

Then there's Dutch. Oh boy! That's a gooood swearing language. Maybe it's the fact I've lived in the Netherlands, but not Spain or Sweden. Cycling in Amsterdam presents plenty of opportunities for a well-aimed sukkel ("dickhead") or vieze klootzak ("dirty ballbag").

But I think it's more than that. Dutch swearing has weight, it has venom, especially with that guttural g-. Take my personal favourite, godverdomme. It's a simple "goddamn", but it's full of delicious filth and spite. It sounds great when it's drawn out, with a long leading g-, a sharp d- (almost t-), a trilled -r-, and a thumping emphasis on -DOMme.

G-g-g-gottverrrrrrDOMme!

That's actually my go-to cuss these days for general setbacks and disappointments. It's just so much fun. Even its sanitised version, potverdorie, has a nice swing to it.

But it's easy to go too far. I've been reprimanded by friends for using g-dv-rd-mme a little too often for polite society. And Dutch swearing gets pretty nasty. I'll refrain from translating kutwijf here.

Uniquely, there are a lot of illness-based swears in Dutch. Tering, pleuris, and syphilis ("tuberculosis", "pleurisy", and "syphilis" obvnov.) are all valid terms of abuse. You can even gravely insult someone by calling them "pokkelijder", even though the disease has officially been eradicated from nature since the 1980s.

IMO, the worst of the bunch has to be the venomous kankerhoer ("cancer-whore") which sounds as utterly nasty as its meaning.

Worrabout you folk? Any prized foreign swearwords up your cocking sleeves?

Curators of @Sweden

2012-01-13T09:29:00.000+01:00

"Every week, someone in Sweden is @Sweden: sole ruler of the world’s most democratic Twitter account."

Since just before Xmas, the official Twitter account for Sweden has been run by an assortment of Swedish citizens: one social media expert, one Bosnian immigrant, an ad man who hunts, a student organic sheep farmer, and over the past week a female minister of the Swedish church who's been tweeting about dancerobics, jazz dance, and the merits of techno.

It's a smart move by the Swedish tourist board. What better "brand ambassadors" for the country than a selection of its (for the most part) friendly, easygoing, open-minded populace?

Their feed is now a engaging mix of very specific personal experience and genteel flag-waving:

Eating lamb from your own farm with a nice glass of red wine. There is nothing better.

These are the best ABBA-lines I know: "I'm nothing special, in fact I'm a bit of a bore. If I tell a joke, you've probably heard it before."

Tomorrow my little girl goes back to Paris. Allways hard to leave her at the airport, seeing her going away. :( ... You should think that I got used to it after allmost 10 years of living in different countries and lots of traveling, but you never do.

What is also great about Sweden: politicians/decision makers are easily accessible, I've even made friends with some of them on Twitter.

Anna, the Minister, has been worth following, though the sheep farmer has perhaps been the most entertaining. When he wasn't posting pictures of lambs and arguing passionately for organic meat, he was reminiscing about gothic poetry slams:

When I was in Stockholm this winter my friends brought me to a sci-fi bookstore in "gamla stan" (old parts of Sthlm).

Where there was this event described as an evening in "lovecraft spirit" containing "zombie poetry".

A panel of experts were sitting in a row and talked about their relations to Lovecraft.

Sometimes a lady stepped up and read "zombie poetry"

One of the experts had the biggest beard I've ever seen, but that's not really relevant.

By the way, H.P Lovecraft was a writer who wrote about tentacles.

But I've been thinking how appropriate this social-democratic experiment is for Sweden. I can't see it working in the UK, where there would be endless debate over the representativeness of each new Twitterer. It also needs that kind of modest pride the Swedes have in their own country - and in the UK national pride is viewed with suspicion or skepticism.

Nor could I see it being as successful in the Netherlands. For starters, most of the Twitterering population is in Amsterdam, and there's an opinion often voiced in other parts of the country that "Amsterdam is not the Netherlands". But more importantly, the Dutch take pride in being outspoken. And the national Twitter account might prove too tempting a platform from which to broadcast some 'refreshingly honest' views...

What do you think? Is this just Scandophilia on my part, am I being harsh on UK & NL here?

Don't Splash the Pot: A Poker Lingo Primer

2012-01-10T08:18:00.000+01:00

I've been an enthusiastic-if-average poker player since 2003, when @J_Hartigan finally convinced me to risk £15 in pursuit of more-than-£15. Before, I'd always thought it was madness to gamble - why would I want to donate my hard-earned (well, "earned", at least) cash to others? Least of all my good friends.

But James was right. (And a few years later, he parlayed his rightness into a position as a poker commentator.) For the price of a night at the cinema, we enjoyed an exhilarating evening of badinage, bravado, and betting. Oh, and somehow I managed to win. Beginner's luck - but I was hooked.

When I started delving into the game, poring over instructional manuals and strategy guides, one thing became clear. This was a game with rich and endlessly entertaining technical jargon. A game where you can flop a monster but check it in an attempt to sandbag, then push on the turn only to have your opponent suck out on the river. A game where string betting and splashing the pot are understandably frowned upon.

The kind of player that waits for Big Slick in the hole, or better still, wired Aces, is known as a rock. You'll rarely be holding the nuts, so bluffing is sometimes required - but if you ever attempt a three-barrel bluff, make sure it's not against a calling station. And on that subject, it's always embarrassing to get caught out with a busted flush.

Of course, this sounds like so much gibberish to beginners. But give them half an hour and they'll be ragging on the fish and moaning about cold decks like grizzled pros. When sun visors, fat cigars, and cheap whisky are now a rare sight at the common or garden poker table, such brilliantly evocative language gives even a humble home game the ring of authenticity.

Some of my favourite phrases are below. For more of this lingo, you could do worse than checking out the excellent movie Rounders.

hole or pocket cards - the two private cards dealt to a Hold 'Em player
flop - in Texas Hold 'Em, this refers to the first 3 community cards, dealt face-up in the middle of the table
turn - the 4th community card
river - the 5th community card (so called "because so many men have drowned on the river")
Pocket Rockets - Ace-Ace
Big Slick - Ace-King
Cowboys - King-King
Siegried & Roy - Queen-Queen
Fishhooks - Jack-Jack
Motown - Jack-5
The Hammer - 2-7 offsuit, the weakest hand in Hold 'Em, is ironically named "The Hammer" because of its lack of strength
monster - a massively strong holding
nuts - the best possible hand at that point
busted straight or flush - an incomplete hand, with only 4 of the 5 needed for a straight or flush
rock - a good, solid, but predictable player, who can be vulnerable to bluffs
fish - a weak player that has trouble holding onto his chips
calling station - a player that will call any bet... therefore dangerous to bluff against
sandbag - to trap a player by checking in order to feign weakness, then re-raising when they bet
push - to go all-in, i.e. bet all your chips
suck out - to get lucky by hitting a very unlikely card to win the hand
three-barrel bluff - to bravely bluff on the flop, the turn, and the river...
string bet - to bet a small amount, and then quickly add more chips, in order to gauge your opponents reaction
splash the pot - to toss your new bet in with the chips already in the pot... something which makes it difficult to check how much a player has really bet

Currently Reading: 070112

2012-01-07T16:59:00.000+01:00

Winter in Madrid - CJ Sansom

Spies in Spain.

Teach Yourself: Complete Swedish

Have been told this is making me sound like a geriatric.

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Masterly.

Harrington on Cash Games - Dan Harrington & Bill Robertie

Useful.

The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker

Enlightening.

Flourish - Martin Seligman

Brilliant. Positive psychology sounds absolutely fascinating. But the cheesy title and self-helpy cover mean I keep this one hidden on the bookshelves. What about a rationalist-friendly cover, pleaze?

96 Girls

2012-01-05T08:42:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I resumed posting over here: #43, Esther.

This is from a flash fiction exercise started last January. I'd had the idea of assembling a collection of flash fiction pieces. While I pondered, sprawled on the sofa, staring at a rhomboid ceiling, Jimmy Ruffin's 96 Tears was playing. Hence Ninety-Six Girls is 96 separate short stories, scenes, and sketches of exactly 96 words apiece.

The first few pieces went up in January and February 2011, and I planned to be done by summer. But they dwindled to a trickle until a busy August - October. The new plan was to finish by the end of the year. But, typically, I tailed off again in November.

It's 12 months after starting and still only halfway. But I'm getting back into it, and used the first writing group of the year to review some of the older Girls and work out how much work those first drafts will need later. Now I need to plug through the next ten or so, past the halfway point, and it's all downhill from there, so hopefully momentum will build...

At the same time I'll need to start marshalling those folk who've said they'd contribute a picture (you know who you are). The plan is to get a picture to accompany each story. So far I've asked some ace illustrators, but also self-professed daydreaming doodlers and occasional sketchers.

The images will all be portrait orientation, 2:3 ratio, and black & white. Otherwise, anything goes. Impressionistic blurs are as valid as straight portraits or still lives. Based on one of the characters, or not. The interesting thing will be to see what other people do in a format that's as limited as the 96-word stories.

Luckily, I know a fair few with the skills or the interest to contribute, but since it'll take something like 60-90 artists to make this work, no doubt I'll be pumping Twitter &c. for more.

Have a read of the stories. If anyone out there wants to pitch in with a drawing, just lemme know.

Best Vegetables: To Err Is Hunam

2012-01-03T08:52:00.000+01:00

A lot of Amsterdam ex-pats don't get around to learning much Dutch. To be honest, it's far from essential. The Dutch (that is, the Amsterdam variety) generally speak excellent English. So when a monolingual Brit, Aussie, or 'Merican fumbles their way through a basic Dutch phrase, the Dutchie will inevitably respond in English.

That's the first hurdle, and it's something I got over through the application of sheer pigheadedness. No matter how mangled my opening gambit, I'd follow up with more toddler-grade Nederlands and just ignore every attempt to turn the conversation back to Engels. Did it make for slow, error-strewn shop transactions? Yes. But it also meant I soon stepped up to "confident basic" and eventually "passable intermediate" Dutch. The errors, of course, are still there. But they're better errors.

If you're lucky enough to work in a predominantly Dutch office, or shack up with a Dutchperson, you're forced to deal with that, of course, but outside of those situations there are few people willing to persist with the pigheaded approach. And it's down, very often, to embarrassment. This surprises me somewhat. Maybe it's because of this language fetish that I don't burn with shame when I say something stupid. Or maybe I'm fatally lacking in embarrassment hormones.

Because over dinner t'other night – Oud en Nieuw, aka New Year's Eve – a few friends said it was embarrassment that stopped them taking those first unavoidably bumbling steps on the way to learning Dutch. They hate to sound clueless, childish, foolishly all-at-sea. So it's more comfortable to stick with their mother tongue.

But f*cking up is the only way to learn. I once signed off an email to a supplier with besten groenten. Best wishes would have been besten groeten, so what I'd actually wished the guy was best vegetables. Haven't got it wrong since, though.

For a long time, in restaurants, I'd ask mag ik betalen? ("can I pay?") when I wanted to order, and mag ik bestellen? ("can I order?") when I wanted to pay. Cornfusing.

It happens every time you try to get the hang of a new tongue. There was the time, not long after my 30th birthday, when a Spanish guy asked me how long I'd been with my partner at the time... or so I thought. Beaming, I told him: quince años ("15 years"). He gave me a worried look, then repeated: cuantos años tiene ella? (How old is she?) "Oh no no no, she's my age, she's not... yeesh."

Oh, and I met a girl who'd gone into a fast food joint in Granada, and instead of ordering chicken (pollo), she asked for cock (polla).

Naturally, we learn from our mistakes rather than our successes. And you can't be afraid of making a few hilarious linguistical booboos. In the end, those slip-ups become like badges of honour, markers of your progress from grunting foreigner to eloquent emigré.

How to Succeed at Everything Instantly

2011-12-31T16:23:00.000+01:00

This is what's otherwise known as a "New Year's Resolutions" post. I had some pretty unproductive years between 2007-2009. In fact, this was my self-admonishment not to chase my own tail:

Idiotically, I thought the way to correct the cycle of futility was to change EVERYTHING. ALL AT ONCE. New Year's Resolutions were an opportunity to force a bajillion reversals on my long-entrenched habits. Here's the first NYR list I came up with for 2012:

Get up at 7am every day
Complete 96 Girls
Blog every other day
Get my ultrabasic Swedish to conversational level
Write a movie script about a ***** by a ******* **** ******** in *********
Exercise at least twice a week
Learn to play the harmonica

That's not even the complete list. It went on for another coupla dozen points, including such vagaries as "Cook more" and "Don't waste time".

But as the estimable Richard Wiseman has written, and the also-estimable Eric Barker has blogged, this ain't the way to change yer bad behaviours. Most of the above NYRs are imprecise, unbounded, and even abstract. The key to making shiz happen is concrete, delimited, measurable steps.

It also helps not to overreach, and definitely not to assume willpower can force all of these changes. Willpower is a muscle, if you will/if I must (and I'm afraid I just did).

There may well be 113 things I'd like to achieve next year. It feels ambitious to have them all listed out. And maybe I'll keep that full original list, somewhere youz folks can't see it and point and larf.

On that note, have you read that awesome list of NYRs by Woody Guthrie? Do, it's ace. But Woody Guthrie is a legend, and I'm but a fule. A fule who at least has an idea of his limitations.

Thurrfore, the revised list of NYRs will be as follows. It only applies to January, so that I can check, see how it's going, and plan another bunch o' stuff for February. See, by then, some of these will have started to become new behaviours, and they'll just happen, and they won't need to be called out as Resolutions.

Write eight new 96 Girls
Post ten blog posts on the blog
Complete two sections in Teach Yourself: Complete Swedish

Better, huh?

So those are my Resolutions and how I'll ensure I achieve them: how about YOU?

Call Your Girlfriend

2011-12-15T21:04:00.000+01:00

Robyn killed it on SNL last weekend, with barnstorming renditions of "Call Your Girlfriend" and "Dancing On My Own". When I say killed it, I mean she absolutely k-i-l-l-e-d it. She just puts everything into her performance, singing from the heart and dancing with what looks like joyous abandon... I mean, shorely it's heavily choreographed, but she makes it look like she's just bouncing around her own private nightclub. So very much to love about this:

OK, so those boots are all kinds of wrong and she shares a haircut with Gareth from the Office (UK), but you gotta love that too, right? Coolest - popstar - ever.

Anyhoo, some focus. I'm meant to be writing about language these days. So I was agog at the sheer awesomeness of this performance, but what really did it for me is the song itself. This was the first time I paid proper attention to the lyric, and the genius of it is the way it encapsulates three viewpoints through the words of just one person in the love triangle.

This isn't a Pussycat Dolls-style "ditch that bitch and come home with me" message. It's much subtler than that, and it works fantastically because the melody and words both complement each other so well.

The tune starts with a blast of joyous optimism that soars when it hits the third line, and it perfectly fits the "can't believe this is happening" excitement of the new girl:

Call your girlfriend, it's time you had the talk
Give your reasons, say it's not her fault
But you just met somebody new...

Then there's a swooning, ABBAesque line that's just heartbreaking, and of course this is about the poor rejected soon-to-be ex-girlfriend:

Then you tell her that the only way her heart will mend
Is when she learns to love again...

OK, so I might just be looking for it now, but there even seems to be a moment of deadened insistence followed by pleading falsetto, that just happens to sum up the position of the boy caught in the middle:

And it won't make sense right now but you're still her friend
And then you let her down easy.

Utterly brilliant! Who else would have the chops and the chutzpah to write a pop song that does that?

Now That's New

2011-12-12T13:58:00.001+01:00

Humans are unparalleled masters of pattern recognition. It enables us to recognise our friends and families, understand mathematics, even to tell and enjoy elaborate narratives.

It also turns me into a bit of a tool.

When learning languages, I'm always trying to map a new word onto one in English or another language, no matter how tenuous the connection.

Happy in Swedish is glad, which couldn't be more straightforward; in Dutch it's blij, which shares with English blithe and bliss the same Proto-Germanic root of blīþiz.

You can imagine how blissfully glad I was when I heard that the Swedish for parnip is palsternacka: "So does that mean the Russian poet is really Boris Parsnip? Ha ha ha."

OK, so my sense of humour is pretty poor, but I won a €5 bet with that one. True story.

It doesn't always work out. I was convinced that these pairs all came from the same Proto Germanic or at least Indo-European root:

English new – now

Dutch nieuwe – nu

Swedish ny – nu

Because what could be more new than now? Both adjectives describe a sort of temporal up-to-dateness. It's self-evident, right?

Actually, no. D'oh!

New tracks back through Proto Germanic *newjaz to Proto Indo-European *newos. But now has its roots in PIE *nu. Who knew?

Swedish Hurdles #1: Non-Obvious Negatives

2011-12-09T13:59:00.001+01:00

Like you, I'm used to associating words that start n- with negatives:

English somewhere – nowhere,

Dutch ergens – nergens;

someone – noone,

iemend – niemand.

And so we should. The majority of the world's languages use the nasal phonemes n and even more commonly, m, in negatives:

The use of nasal phonemes in the negative in so many languages of the world must in some way be related to the prevailingly nasal character of the grunt.

(The Origin and Diversification of Language by Morris Swadesh, Joel Sherzer, Dell Hymes.)

Oh, so that's why. Gotcha.

The Swedish for no is nej ("nayy"). So far so good. But the Swedish for not is inte ("eente"), and since it doesn't start with that crucial n- I can feel a tiny hesitation when I try to sling it into a sentence, a few extra milliseconds as my brain scrambles around for the word. "Surely I left it here with all the n-first negatives... no? Has someone moved the bloody word again?"

Anyways, that's manageable, but I can't get the hang of the indefinite pronouns:

några ("nawgra") – some

någon – someone

något – something

någonstans – somewhere

My n-obsessed mind always assumes those are words for noone, nothing, etc. But no, that would be:

ingen ("eenyen") – none or noone

ingenting – nothing

ingenstans – nowhere

When I hear några or något or one of their misleading friends, all I currently think is "I don't know what that means... but I know it's not a negative".

X Great Reasons to Learn Another Language

2011-11-27T14:59:00.000+01:00

Where X =however many reasons I end up listing below. As part of this new productivity drive, I'll be paying more attention to all those blogs about how to write a successful blog. So you can expect to see many more titles along the lines of "Why YOU Should Care About Dangling Participles", and "Received Pronunciation: Can It Cure Cancer?"

So: why learn another language? Especially in the time of Babelfish et al. And when English is the second most widely spoken language worldwide in terms of number of speakers (and in some respects has a stronger claim to being the #1 lingua franca than Mandarin, but let's come back to that).

¿Porqué no? Waarom niet? Varför inte? In other words, "why nork?" (As I just entered it in Google Translate just now, checking the accents in the Swedish translation.) Ahem.

1. WHY NOT?

OK, that's not a satisfactory reason. I wouldn't respond "why not" if someone suggested I study forensic accounting. On the other hand, it's clearly a more worthwhile use of your time than playing Angry Birds. Note to self: delete Angry Birds from phone, again.

2. IT'S HARDWIRED

When people tell you they're hopeless at languages, it's usually nonsense. This stuff is wired into our brains. OK, one person might find it easier to pick up a second language than another, but if you're trying and it's really not taking hold there is only one reason: yer doin it wrong. Maybe you need to be immersed in another tongue to really get to grips with it. In that case, move to another country, or simply shack up with a foreigner. If you can't do either of those – though I recommend if at all possible you do – there's no end of audiovisual and written material out there on the interthings. Watch a movie.

3. THE ART OF ROMANCE (i.e. TALKING TO GIRLS)

Swedish women are rightly famed for their pulchritude. Everyone talks about Brazilian mulheres, but have you ever gotten to know an Argentinian chica, too? You should. There's a whole half a world out there of people of your preferred gender, and if you use a few clumsy phrases of their mother tongue, they either find it charming or hilarious. Of course, a bad chat-up line in a foreign language is still a bad chat-up line. I once told a Dutch girl, apropos of nothing, that she had een mooie glimlach ("a beautiful smile"), and she waved me on like a traffic cop herding cars.

4. CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

Should this have been ahead of #3? Probably not. Anyways, this is self-explanatory, right? Just think of all those supposedly untranslatable words like duende (Spanish for something approximating to "soul" in artistic performance), saudade (Portuguese, "the feeling of missing something you love while knowing that the likelihood of of return is unknowable and entirely left to fate"), gezellig (the Dutch classic, an amalgam of "cosy atmosphere" and "good company") and schadenfreude (German for "pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune"). That last word was so useful that we just had to co-opt it into English full-time.

5. SAY "NO!" TO SENILITY

This reason is all kinds of awesome. Having a second language can delay the onset of Alzheimer's or senile dementia. That's just brilliant. Alzheimer's is a terrible condition, and if you can fight it that easily, why the holy crikey wouldn't you?

6. UTILITY

Knowing that you need to "ceda el paso" to oncoming traffic could save you from a painful fender bender. When in France, you can avoid being fined for public urination if you know which way the "pissoir" is.

7. THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF SPIES

I was impressed that Jason Bourne could speak Dutch. Who's ever seen a spy do that? Russian, Cantonese, sure - but Dutch? Dude had mad linguistical skills. OK, so I've never needed to blag my way into a heavily fortified Colombian Embassy, but a sprinkling of Spanish or a dollop of Dutch has come in handy for having personally sensitive, or snarky and abusive conversations, in a roomful of English speakers.

8. UNDERSTANDING YOUR OWN TONGUE
Proscriptive grammarians will claim that double negatives are illogical bullshit (I'm paraphrasing), as if the English language were bound by mathematical rules. A quick look at French negatives, with negating words required before and after the verb – "je n'ai pas" – shows that languages can function perfectly well with double negatives. So that particular rule is simply down to the difference between "the Queen's" English and dialects, as if one were more valid than the other.

9. SHOWING OFF

See also #3. I'm particularly guilty of this, though I'm hardly a linguistic wunderkind. If I know the Bulgarian word for accountant, I'm going to find a way to shoehorn it into conversation whenever there are Bulgars in the vicinity. Yes, it's quite irritating, from what close friends have told me, but hey, it that same urge will also make sure you learn faster. And for every person who thinks you a pretentious tool, there will be at least one that thinks it's actually quite cool. Because speaking another language *is* cool.

10. TRIVIAL PURSUITS
Hat-tip to @mrleeward for pointing out that the American English "wiseacre" (a cocky know-it-all) derives from the Dutch waarzegger, a soothsayer or fortune teller. I don't know how many times that kind of question will come up in a pub quiz, but I bet it's some.

Well, look at that! X = 10. The Romans will be pleased. Anyways, there are my X reasons to learn another language. Sneakily, I've left out a biggie that I want to return to another time. This post is long enough as it is...

Advice to a friend on the occasion of his 30th birthday

2011-11-25T12:46:00.000+01:00

Dear A–,

Well, it's almost your 30th birthday, and that means it's time to take stock. By now you can comfortably call yourself a MAN, even by the retarded standards of our perpetually adolescent generation(s).

At this point, you might want to throw on some background music. I suggest "ST ELMO'S FIRE (MAN IN MOTION)" performed by John Parr, from the film "ST. ELMO'S FIRE". Don't be confused, the title of the song has the words "(MAN IN MOTION)" but the title of the film does not.

What does it mean to be a MAN? I don't have all the answers – no-one does! If I did, I'd write them all down in a book called "The Seventeen Things That Make A Man", and I would sell it on Amazon until I had enough money to buy my own island, and there would be monkey butlers, and world famous female tennis players playing naked beach tennis 24-7, and an infinity pool. But I digress.

I ask again: what does it mean to be a man? I don't have all the answers… we've covered that part. But from my vantage point at the tail end of my thirties, I would like to offer a few pointers, a few thought-provoking questions that you might wish to ponder over some hand-rolled Cuban brandy and a large glass of cigars.

1. Have I made my parents proud?Your teenaged self would no doubt scoff at this, but as time goes on we all realize that there is no substitute for family. We've all tried throwing a Christmas dinner populated with cardboard cutouts of Reece Witherspoon, but it's just not the same.

2. Do I have a job in the transmedia advermarketing megasphere?Self-explanatory.

3. Am I a living Brand?This is a trick question. If you refer to yourself as a Brand, you are a twisted freak with no place on God's green earth and you should HIDE YOUR HEAD IN SHAME. Only aging footballers and female celebrities who've "accidentally" appeared in a sex tape can legitimately refer to themselves as a Brand.

4. Do I still masturbate with frightening regularity?This never goes away. Never. If you find a way to stop it, please let me know. Let all of us know. For the love of god, please won't somebody make it stop!

5. Have I truly "put away all childish things"?This is perhaps the most important point, and I can't stress it enough. Perhaps it was stupid of me to leave it till last. Anyways, I am sure that you will find, as I and billions like me have found, that one cannot truly call oneself a MAN until one has put away all childish things. I shouldn't have to, but over the page I'm going to give you a list of childish things that you should now turn your back on:

Being drunk
Bicycles
Dance music
Drugs (illegal ones – over the counter prescription drugs are fine)
Fancy dress parties
Facebook
Lego
Musty dewflaps
Nicknames
Paper clips (real men use staples)
Peas
Pretending to smoke
Pretending not to smoke
Xbox

Obviously that's not a complete list. Maybe you would enjoy thinking of some of your own examples? I've put these ones in alphabetical order, so if you do add some items, make sure they all come after Xb–.

No doubt you have a lot to think about now. Take your time. It's not easy, becoming a man. Did you enjoy listening to "ST. ELMO'S FIRE"? I'm confident that you did.

If you have any questions, please don't contact me. I won't answer.

Yours sincerely,B–

Pic of A– with gift that accompanied the letter:

Return of the Incredible Hulk

2011-11-22T14:08:00.001+01:00

My blogging history is kind of like Incredible Hulk movies. Largely forgettable, and rebooted every couple of years.

Soon the big green angry guy will get a turn in the Avengers flick. Therefore it must be time to restart this blog. After all, I like the HearCanal title. Why have I left it dormant for so long?

So busy and difficult to find the time but Twitter and nnrrrnfffgggnnnffrr *GAGS SELF WITH BALLED-UP SWEAT SOCK*

P-toosh. Excuse me.

Well, I had been writing mostly about music, a little about books, plus Amsterdam. Also tattoos. But as any fule no, blogs work best when they're a single proposition dealio. That shapeless hodgepodge of topics wasn't holding my interest, let alone anyone else's.

And what's the point of writing about music when you don't host download links? You won't get the readers.

So, a good six weeks before I normally throw myself into some unsustainable fresh start, here goes with HearCanal mk.xiii, "The Canalling". What's it about?

LANGUAGE.

I'm writing (fiction) fairly regularly now, as well as learning a few foreign languages - on and off, as circumstances dictate - and I've always been a word nerd. So there really is no other choice.

And that's l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e in the broadest sense. Etymology, phraseology, slang, kennings and quirks, foreign languages and dialects and idioms and the glorious behemoth that is English. Obvnoviously.

Till later..!

Flash Fiction: Monday III

2011-01-17T19:30:00.000+01:00

On a Monday they were married and on a Monday their first was born, and thereafter the day held a talismanic significance for my parents. They would often confide, in a proud whiskied whisper, how my youngest sibling was conceived on a Monday, and delivered thirty-six weeks on the dot.

The various eccentricities of our parents inclined my sisters and I, not to solidarity, but rather to a surly enmity that dispersed all too late, after Father's death one black Monday, and Mother's the following Sunday night, as if a new week without him was too awful to bear.

I Heart Pingers

2010-06-30T09:12:00.000+02:00

On The YouTube Win & Pirate Bay Appeal

2010-06-29T21:30:00.002+02:00

You saw, rite, that Google+YouTube successfully defended against an action brought by Viacom?

District Judge Louis Stanton said in his ruling: "Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough. The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity."

What's surprising, mebbe, is that this judgement went down in Manhattan. It used to be that the USA was becoming more protective of copyright than Europe. Most of the sabre-rattling came from the RIAA. But boy, have those lobbyists got their claws into Europe now!

Thanks to unelected representative Lord Peter "nice yacht, Mr Geffen" Mandelson, the 3 strikes legislation in the UK will mean ISPs do have to actively monitor activity on their networks and act on behalf of the entertainment companies. Those entertainment companies that have failed to innovate to match the times, and now believe that they should be subsidized by technology providers (except the really big ones with good lawyers), and the consumer.

When the Pirate Bay defended itself against the entertainment giants in Sweden, they lost (you decide how much the case was affected by the judge being "a member of several copyright protection organisations").

But what affect has that successful action had? Only $30,000 of the $6mill fine has been harvested. The Pirate Bay was not a money-making machine, what advertising the site had went towards costs. Let's remember that copyright laws are there to stop BUSINESSES making money from copyright infringement. It's not about consumers (and technologists with an agenda).

You know that filesharing hasn't slowed any. Yet despite this Hollywood tallied a best ever box office last year - in fact the slow but continual growth of Hollywood's take may even follow the growth in filesharing. (Let's ignore 2005, when Return of the Sith had moviegoers fleeing cinemas as if their lives depended on it.) Where's the harm, again?

So why did YouTube walk and the Pirate Bay fall (subject to appeal)? Google gots lots of the green stuff. For all the Hollywood/Big Music rhetoric about protecting artists, the copyright debate is not a moral absolute, it's an argument based on promoting both business and artistic creativity. And with any business argument, it ain't about who's right - it's about who's got the best lawyers.

ADDENDUMNEDED: This Harvard Business School paper on filesharing and copyright is worth a read, especially if you're not a freetard or a copyright reactionary, but one of those sensible people that can see the system is f^cked and that it makes more sense to change the system than penalize people *purely* for the fiscal benefit of a few entertainment companies.

Ax Blud

2010-06-28T18:45:00.002+02:00

WTF: Why The Face? Modern Family, Season 1

2010-06-27T19:36:00.003+02:00

There's been a rash of good sitcoms out of the US in the last few years, and IMO, the best offering this year was Modern Family. The show fits a maximum of possible relationships into a minimum of cast members, obsessively ticking off boxes for familial tropes: nuclear family, homosexual partnership, second marriage... 2.5 kids, stepkid, adopted kid...

Listen, when my granddaughter's boyfriend's band plays an under-21 club with my daughter-in-law's brother's gay partner, I show up. That's just how I was raised.

The format, likewise, mixes a modish mockumentary approach with a classical love of a structuring moral lesson. It could have been unfocussed, it could have been too cynical.

MANNY: If this so-called Santa Claus doesn't bring me a burgundy dinner jacket, I'm going to have a big problem.

But it soon became clear that performances and characterization elevate MF to must-watch status. Like Arrested Development, that paragon of ensemble pieces, it's hard to pick out a favourite character: harassed and uptight Claire, out-and-OTT Cameron, the grumpy and confused patriarch Jay (Ed O'Neill - pka Al Bundy).

The show's most original character is Manny Delgado, Jay's precociously sophisticated stepson. At eleven years old, he's a fencing, espresso-sipping, diehard romantic: "You have a laugh that makes science lab seem like recess."

And Phil Dunphy is reliably ace, whether struggling to master his inner child or fluffing roleplay with his wife ("I'm in town for a trade show. I design high-end electro-acoustic transducers"). But most excruciatingly brilliant of all are his attempts at cool parenting:

PHIL: Now come on, pretend I'm not your dad. We're just a couple of friends kickin' it in a juice bar.
HALEY: What's a juice bar?
PHIL: Okay a malt shop, whatever.
HALEY: Dad, I don't...
PHIL: No, who's dad, who's dad? I'm Marcus, from Biology. Hey Haley! How's it going with you and Dylan? Does he try anything inappropriate with you, girl?
HALEY [answering phone]: Hey. I don't know, nothing, just talking to some dork I met in a malt shop.

Modern Family also gains, ahem, aesthetic bonus points for the ~~presence~~ performance of Gloria (Sofia Vergara). The Jules Rimet of trophy wives, she is so ridiculously attractive that the tide comes in whenever the show airs. Claire Dunphy is no slouch herself in the hotness plus humorousness stakes - still, there's plenty of mileage in her husband's puppyish crush on the Colombian coal digger. "Is she moving in slow-motion or is my brain doing that?"

See? She's funny too!

MF does a neat job of walking the tightrope between scathing cynicism and warm-hearted feel-goodery, often taking the ironic route of delivering the happy glow of the latter through the swift jabs of the former. Look no further than Jay's prickly but ultimately charming acceptance of his own gay son, and his Colombian stepson.

By the time you add in heaps of physical comedy (Claire's shoes flying off in opposite directions as she sprints through a mall; the Dunphy's regular pratfalls on the perpetually broken step), and a sprinkling of choice guest stars (Kristin Schaal, the ubiquitous Elizabeth Banks, Ed Norton as the guitarist from Spandau Ballet), I am well and truly sold.

While Community also started strong, it lost points for relegating John Oliver's professor to occasional guest slots, and as the weeks went by it slipped into something of a wacky rut - enjoyable, but too knowingly kooky. Family, in contrast, didn't tinker with its make-up, and only went from strength to strength. The season is packed with strong episodes, but the standouts for me were Game Changer, with Claire's quest to buy Phil an iPad (Game Changer), and Fizbo's birthday party, complete with clown, bouncy castle, rope slide, crossbow, poisonous critters, and comb sheaths.

With only standalone episodes, there were a few storylines that already felt like too much of a retread - we don't need to see Mitchell struggling to find a way to be a manly father again - and so the only worry is that next year could stagnate too quickly, unless longer story arcs give the characters time for a bit more complexity. But the show's been so well-handled till now that this seems an unlikely possibility.

PHIL: Ling is not a nerd. He built his own helicopter, and if he was alive today...

Do as they say, not as they do

2010-06-08T10:03:00.000+02:00

From the "hypocrisy is the greatest luxury" department:

Warner Bros might be getting sued for pirating... anti-piracy technology;

Bono loves censorship in China and thinks we can all learn a lot from it;

Nicolas Sarkozy, who has twice introduced "three strikes" to France, is also happy for his team to pirate DVDs en masse - so while Sarkozy indulges in unauthorised copying, he tries to disconnect kids doing exactly the same thing (only the kids aren't doing it from a love of power);

Back with Warner Bros (who think Spotify doesn't pay them enough), top exec Edgar Bronfman Jr faces insider trading charges relating to his time at Universal, along with Jean-Marie Messier - so the self-appointed judges who have decided that filesharers are criminals, don't see any reason why they themselves should toe the line. Ironic that they describe filesharing as "theft", "stealing", and "piracy" - how the hell will they describe insider trading? Presumably as "an honest mistake"...

And, most disquieting of all, music industry execs think child porn is really handy. It gives them a hot topic to get politicians lathered up about, in order to sneak through provisions for inspecting internet traffic.

Just a few things to bear in mind when weighing up the "moral" implications of the record industry's fight against filesharers. There is no moral aspect, it's just so much propaganda. We're so far from a balanced discussion of this question, it just ain't funny.

I Want to Go There! 30 Rock, Season 4

2010-06-03T23:49:00.003+02:00

30 Rock, still killing it in its fourth season, and only getting stronger.

This year introduced Liz's imaginary boyfriend, astronaut Mike Dexter, and her hysterically hellish encounters with her settling soulmate, Wesley "there's only one Wesley Snipes" Snipes (guest Michael Sheen). Jack's continuing tussles with Banks (the always brilliant Will Arnett), and then on this whole guest tip: not just Julianne Moore but the brilliant Elizabeth Banks to boot. There was Tracy's ongoing quest to win the EGOT, sparked off by a shopping trip for a simple and classy gift for his wife ("that's why people come to Jacob's Nubian Bling Explosion").

And of course, the new supreme expression of rapturous excitement: "I want to go there!"

Unlike The Office, its only sitcom peer for popularity and quality, 30 has so far failed to spawn any offshoots or imitators. Both series continue to deliver sharp writing and spanking performances. 30's particular chemistry might be harder to recreate, its balance of self-aware satire and screwball soap (also see: Arrested Development).

Liz: I just found out that Jenna is dating a guy who does a drag show... as her.
Jack: Well, Lemon, what is with this food layout? Kenneth says he needs some sumac bark and shrub yellow root to make a poultice for Argus.
Liz: How is your thing weirder than mine?!

The Office was a remake to begin with, and the rigid format it's kinda refined, plus the same mix of great comic actors and actorly comics, has been well cloned in Parks and Recreation. You can see its bone structure in Modern Family. On the other hand, 30 works because despite its outlandish characters, those characters inhabit its cast so damn fully. (Yes, I think that the right way round.) It's true for Liz, Donaghy, on down to Kenneth, but especially so for Tracy. Who else could relate a traumatic childhood so vividly?

Payday Gigroll: June '10

2010-05-22T17:20:00.000+02:00

Over the next month, you'll want to find a way into one of these gigs, whether by hook, crook, guestlist, or plain ol'-fashioned blackmail:

JOANNA NEWSOM - MELKWEG, Sun 30 May
Pitchfork fave Newsom has developed over the last coupla releases, so that the sparse and obtuse medieval sound of Ys has thankfully been tempered with stronger melodies and warmer vocals. But she has always had a phenomenal voice, and this should make for a spellbinding show.

JONSÍ, PARADISO, Thu 3 June
Tickets still available (just) for the Sigur Ros singer's second solo night at Paradiso. Fans of epic and ethereal pop should get a move on before this sells out too.

It's a damn shame THEM CROOKED VULTURES have already sold out at Heineken Music Hall - Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, Jon-Paul Jones? Frack me, that's a supergroup! A week later (Sat 19 June), and heavy in a very different way, TIËSTO's Kaleidoscope World Tour rolls into town for the benefit of the trance-heads.

Elsewhen, namely Friday 4 June, DAWN LANDES delivers some delicious folk-pop up at Bitterzoet (Fri 4); meanwhile THE HEAVY booked an extra night on which to shake down Paradiso with their gritty R&B - might be worth getting into that gig for "How You Like Me Now?" alone.

Later in the month, TEGAN & SARA try out their twindie-pop thing at Paradiso on Thursday 17.

If you're hankering for something more worldly, the AMSTERDAM ROOTS FESTIVAL, running 17-20 June, runs the gamut from Balkan gypsy hip-hop to urban rhumba. I'd recommend catching Senegalese rappers DAARA J FAMILY on Sunday 20.

THE HOLD STEADY, MELKWEG, Mon 21 Jun
The boisterous, boozy, bar-room ballads of the brilliant Hold Steady will get a welcome airing at Melkweg next month. Never has "Springsteenian" been so apt a compliment. Go see.

ONE TO AVOID
Finally, a big sarcastic shout out to the bloody awful SNOW PATROL, who despite being the auditory equivalent of a rancid slice of cheesecake topped with glass shards, have managed to sell out 2 nights at the HMH. I hope everyone reading this had more sense than to pay €47.50 a ticket for the questionable privilege of seeing that bunch of dreary penii.

Spotify live in the Netherlands

2010-05-19T00:03:00.001+02:00

Eindelijk, finally: Spotify's gone live in the Netherlands.

The music streaming service might just replace your reliance on iTunes. Access to a vast music library, and all you need is a broadband connection. Save and share playlists, and they're also pushing integration with Last.fm and Facebook - though scrobbling. And it better not spew out FB status updates. *SHAKES FIST*

The basic free account plays one ad about every twenty minutes, and limits you to 20 hours streaming a month. €4.99 gets an Unlimited account without time restriction, and the €9.99 Premium gives offline playlists and mobile access, if you like that sort of thing.

Now I'll be searching for a plug-in or doodad that can stream the Spotify audio through remote speakers, like the AirTunes facility in iTunes.

Record companies are still grumbling about royalties earned thru the service, but yer Spotifys and Hulus really are the best way for content creators to get paid online. While the royalty rates probably do need to improve, that could come with increased ad spend as the audience grows. We've moved out of the period when it was possible to retire after one hit record. Who's to say if that's a good thing. (Yes. Yes it is.)

Bloomin' cheek

2010-02-24T19:18:00.000+01:00

UK Music complains of BBC bias over the Digital Rights bill.

They're bound to do this, since they are a corporate lobby seeking to grant copyright holders authority over the public's right to an internet connection.

Of course, you might think that the BBC had a duty to point out to viewers the serious and worrying flaws in the bill.

Feargal "Sharkey" Sharkey defends their position:

Sharkey said (the BBC) was presented with evidence in advance of the broadcast that the DEB proposal suggests a person suspected of infringing copyright will be sent approximately 50 copyright infringement notices before being considered to be a "serious repeat infringer". Rights holders will not know the person's personal details at that time.

But of course, and as Cory Doctorow pointed out in the same Culture Show, those infringement notices could be sent to entirely innocent parties. No right of appeal. No independent verification of the purported infringement. No burden of proof, FFS!

So once again, the facts about three strikes:
- Rights holders use illegal methods to investigate web traffic
- Rights holders decide which users are infringing
- Rights holders mandate the disconnection of the people they have decided are infringing

They don't have to be fair, they don't even have to be right.

Record companies and film studios as unilateral arbiters of your right to be online.

And they're lobbying like hell to make it happen.

Here, once more for fun, is Peter Mandelson holidaying it up with David Geffen.

Oh, and: record companies screwing their artists out of digital royalties (yes, those artists that they say they're trying to protect).

It's my label, and I'll run it into the ground ignoring irreversible global trends if I want to

2010-02-16T09:31:00.000+01:00

- Edgar Bronfman views Spotify with suspicion.

So Warner Music might pull their rekkids from "free" streaming services like Spotify. Presumably because the royalty rates aren't high enough.

The 'get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price strategy', is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.

Seems ridiculously short-sighted. Your stock is falling (you claim) because of the effects of filesharing, but the nice chaps at Spotify come up with a solution, a way for somebody to pay for all the music that's being listened to... and you rubbish it because it's appealing to consumers. Remember, Mr Bronfman, radio is another pernicious "free" source of music, why not pull your music from radio too?

Never mind that many commentators (and right-thinking people) believe licensed streaming of music/video could begin to curtail illegal downloading. Essentially because it's becoming quicker and easier, and is beginning to challenge torrents and such.

As blogger Marc Cohen notes, multiple revenue streams are necessary: "ad-supported music will not save a troubled industry. But it helps."

No, instead Warners suggest that they could offer its own subscription service, somehow forgetting that every music service launched by a major label has been a spectacular failure.

Says Yankee analyst Michael Goodman:
"In the end, record labels will have to share control of the content with the consumer..."

Top ten biggest songs on iTunes, like, evah

2010-02-12T15:39:00.001+01:00

Pop quiz: how many of the all-time biggest selling songs on iTunes are any good?

1. Black Eyed Peas, "I Gotta Feeling"
2. Lady GaGa, "Poker Face"
3. Black Eyed Peas, "Boom Boom Pow"
4. Jason Mraz, "I'm Yours"
5. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida"
6. Lady Gaga & Colby O'Donis, "Just Dance"
7. Flo Rida, "Low feat. T-Pain"
8. Taylor Swift, "Love Story"
9. Leona Lewis, "Bleeding Love"
10. Ke$ha, "Tik Tok"

That's right, 15% of them. "Poker Face", and a half point for "Just Dance" because babyfaced twatorama Colby O'Donis is somehow involved, though I can't remember where he might appear in the song.

You do the math(s)[!]

2010-02-03T09:23:00.000+01:00

So I figure this year will be all about banging the same drum as last year.

Namely, that the major record labels cannot lay the blame for their financial woes solely at the feet of filesharers; that ludicrously high damages effectively turn those filesharers into modern-day serfs; and that the introduction of "three strikes" policing of filesharing has terrible implications for a open and free internet.

This is not a freetard rant. I'm freakin' lucky to receive stacks of promo material through my work, and I'm a regular iTunes Store customer. I just think, if the labels want to survive, they need to pursue other avenues than the criminilisation of their customers.

When the record companies try to take the moral high ground, bear in mind that these are the same people who fix prices to put the squeeze on consumers, and who screw their own artists out of royalties at the same time as they claim to be defending their livelihoods.

W-, -T-, and indeed, -F?!

There's also a brute economic dimension to this that few are willing to engage with. Yes, a copyright is an artificial value, and this should be maintained in some fashion if we want to support creativity. But it's also true that there's been a massive shift in our ability to create and distribute music - it's cheaper and easier than ever. And the artifical value we place on copyrights should reflect this.

But while the labels will bleat about things like declining local markets, they will also fail to highlight the fact that the music released in 2008 was more than quadruple the amount we saw in the early 2000's. And naturally they want us to buy more of it. But at the same prices as a decade or two ago, when it was more expensive to produce and distribute the stuff. The amount and availability of music is increasing exponentially. It make no sense.

Adapt or die. Trying to maintain the old order is an act of willful stupidity of Cnutian proportions.

Biff! Pow! Scholarly Debate!

2010-01-03T16:03:00.001+01:00

Logicomix: an absorbing graphic novel that I couldn't even attempt to sum up better than the dedicator of my copy did:

Here's a fun story about superheroes, about how Captain Logic battled his nemesis, the evil Dr Gödel, for the soul of mathematics. There's some sex too!

Of course, in the text "Captain Logic" is only ever referred to as "Bertrand Russell", and "some sex" turned out to be slightly erroneous - granted, there's a bit of sexual obsession, but nowhere did I encounter logicians getting jiggy with it. Except where it = the mathematization of logic.

The subject matter might sound dry, but the story is driven by the crusading Bertie Russell and a host of obsessive characters. Complex mathematics and brain-bending logical tautologies are explained accessibly but without dumbing-down. And what could be more fun than probing the connections between the study of logic and madness?

I'd read Apostolos Doxiadis's excellent novel, "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture", and clearly the man is on a quest to popularise some of the most fiendishly complex cornerstones of mathematical thought.

Next year, we eagerly await his first foray into television production, a Cowellesque pleb-talent-comp-insult-romp entitled "Greece's Got a Solution to the Riemann Hypothesis". For a chance to enter this once in a lifetime competition, leave your solution in the comments box below! Prize includes tenure in Cambridge and a date with Carol Vordermann!

Before you consider a facelift...

2009-11-26T15:38:00.000+01:00

... consider botox, cheekbone implants, breast enhancement, and extensive photoshopping. I mean, seriously.

"You wanna look like Hurley? Try this expensive cream, just like Liz didn't!"

According to one Dr. Lucy Glancey, “she has quite obviously had some sort of enhancement and it looks like this has been achieved with a semi-permanent injection or Restylane... similar to collagen but lasts much longer”.

Blecch. It must be the ageing process, but the nauseating hypocrisy of the celebrity industry is getting to me more every day. I need some revitalift creamuriser or something.

Full disclosure: I work in advertising, so I'm not playing the offended innocent, but the flagrant contradiction in this is kinda maddening. At least footballers wear football boots.

Ideas Are the Cheapest Things in the World

2009-11-06T15:17:00.001+01:00

Ideas are the cheapest thing in the world.

Given that I work for an ad agency, and have always dreamed of becoming a writer, this might seem like an odd stance. I've mentioned this to a couple of friends and colleagues, both of whom pointed out that really great ideas are actually incredibly expensive. You have to give them the time and resources they deserve.

Yes and no.

After all, ideas are occurring to people all the time. Monkeys operating a coat-check, there's one for you. It might not be practical, people might not appreciate finding their pockets stuffed with banana skins and monkey dung, but you can't deny that monkey coat-check is an idea.

Of course, to shape that idea into something usable or worthwhile would take time and money. But that's not the point, the idea itself was extremely cheap.

Lemons genetically modified to have the flavour of limes, there's another one.

Today, there are 6.795 billion people on the planet. You know the room full of monkeys? Give them an infinite amount of time, and one of them will write Hamlet. Well, if the internet, our connected world, has given us anything it is a roomful of monkeys, chattering away in blissful inanity - most of the time - and very very occasionally (once an hour?) throwing up something worthwhile.

A vomit bib - for the rugby fan attending a formal dinner.

Because all those man hours, all those woman minutes, have been harnessed into a collective pool of information. And our systems of copyright, our approach to "intellectual property" (a phrase I despise more every day), are based on a very shallow pool. Copyright made sense when only a few people had the luxuries of time and money, and could devote endless hours to perfecting an artwork. But technology and modern life have brought us to a time in which ideas (which are cheap) can be brought to life quickly and easily.

The recording and mixing capabilities of an average laptop outstrip anything the Beatles ever worked with. Ablums, and decent ablums at that, can be made in the comfort of a bedroom. Movies too - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started out as a bedroom project.

So millions of copyrights, literally trillions of bytes of intellectual property, are being created every day. Third-world countries may not have the resources of developed nations, but with big enough populations, they now compete with the big boys - look at India's booming tech sector. Most of that is code, and what is code? Ideas and hours. But the salaries obviously don't compare to Silicon Valley.

This is something that will effect - that is affecting - every creative industry, every knowledge market, every art form, every area of technological innovation. This has massive implications for business and culture, and I'm starting to worry that Canute-like efforts to stem the tide of change will end up doing a lot of harm. Instead of adapting to our changing world, we're busy trying to prop up systems that can't cope, and that ultimately work against innovation and creativity.

A band that only plays gigs by telephone, kicking out the jams by conference call. (*FILM RIGHTS HAVE ALREADY BEEN SNAPPED UP FOR THIS IDEA*)

There are two other points that inform this that I'll come back to, and the first is this notion of "creativity", which strikes me as something of a misnomer. Secondly, the idea that we apply copyright in the personal sphere, when really it's much more useful, and much more sensible, to view it as a business thing.

This blogpost is copyrighted. It's certainly not more useful, insightful, or well-written than the memoirs of Hilaire Belloc. But it has the same protection. If you print it out, and stick it up on a school notice-board, my people could have words with your people. Does that make ANY sense?

An umbrella that doubles as a soup bowl.

Would love to know your thoughts.

Passion Pit @ Paradiso, Amsterdam

2009-11-04T22:56:00.005+01:00

Just caught Passion Pit at Paradiso.

The band was hamstrung by a late arrival, the first song sounding especially disjointed until a late surge into a galloping sort of Jon Hughes soundtrack. Obviously missing the luxury of a soundcheck, the early numbers were a grating mess of treble, with cowbells clanging and singer Michael Angelakos's falsetto reduced to a piercing yelp.

They showed a solid grasp of the groove all night (an American Hot Chip?), but it all clicked with a surging run of euphoric and bassier, thank feck, synth-led anthems. There goes the ravey one; there's the disco one. The syncopated sampleadelic chants on Chunk of Change's Sleepyhead finally showed up the joy and intricate invention in what they do.

As they closed, Angelakos proved his commitment to the cause by bouncing off the drumkit and popping his shoulder out in the process, returning to stage to soldier on through a two-song encore.

Sold down the river?

2009-11-04T16:52:00.002+01:00

Boing Boing brings the bad news today (well, technically yesterday). Excuse the rant.

*****
UPDATE: Make sure you read Howard Knopf on ACTA, "that's right. Copyright 'violations' (whatever that may mean) are right up there with terrorism and child pornography".
*****

So, on the grounds on national security, the Obama administration refused to disclose the contents of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Difficult to see what that really has to do with national security, but there you go.

The internet chapter of this treaty has now leaked, and it includes provisions for:

* ISPs actively policing copyrighted material on the networks. That means they DON'T have to routinely police for terrorist activity or child pornography, but they do have to continually police in order to help major record labels sue students.

* ISPs being forced to cut off internet access for accused copyright infringers. No trial, no jury, no appeal. Whole families cut off from essential civic information and services.

So once again, the lobbying power of copyright cabals means that the continued wealth of those corporations, and their shareholders, is held to be more important than the rights of the individual. In fact, the continued profitability of those companies is held to be more important than an individual's right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The copyright system is old and outmoded, and in its current form it has no relevance to how the majority of the world consumes media.

Rights owners are desperate to milk the general public for all they are worth, when what they really ought to be doing is focussing on BUSINESSES that use copyrights illegally. I'll post about this later, but there are millions and millions of dollars in lost revenues that copyright owners are missing out on - which should be paid by companies.

But suing students is easier than suing companies.

Despite all their rhetoric, you must understand that copyright owners are not pursuing this course of action because they want to support songwriters or moviemakers. And they will continue to lay off staff, left right and centre.

In fact, the ideal solution for them would be a system that enables them to rake in cash on demand. This is what they are pushing for. Just one guy, sat in a room, clicking addresses at random to sue or disconnect people. No overheads, unbelievably indulgent protection from the world's governments.

And what will suffer? Art and innovation.

Rhetoric of the Copyright Wars, pt.2: "3 strikes"

2009-10-28T13:45:00.004+01:00

Lawks, but this is a wrong-headed policy. You know the one, the one where the copyright lobby suggests that the way to deal with filesharers is to give them 3 warnings - then to disconnect them.

In New Zealand it seemed to be passing into law, but for a last-minute attack of the sensibles. But the policy is being put into action in France. Now Lord Mandelson has unilaterally decided that it's the way forward for the UK.

70% of Brits polled about this disagreed. Even MI5 warned that it could promote the far more worrying use of 'dark nets' by filesharers.

So why would a representative of the British people, albeit an unelected one, proceed with such a plan?

Yes, Mandy went to dinner with David Geffen of Geffen Records. He went to dinner, and a few days later, he recommended the 3 strikes policy. We'll come back to the lobbying aspect, because it's infuriating enough on its own.

So what's the fundamental problem with 3 strikes? Where to start...

1. The entertainment industry would decide, all by itself, whether someone was a filesharer or not. Making the process wholly biased. And what about right of appeal? And what's with punishing a whole family if only one member is filesharing illegally?

2. The methods used to inspect data, and determine whether someone is filesharing, are often in themselves illegal. Not a civil matter (as with unauthorised copying), but a criminal matter. This is information that only the police and the government should be able to access and use.

3. Internet access is increasingly being viewed as a human right. Think of all the services and government initiatives that are moving to online-only access. So how can you disconnect them because a multinational company decides they are a "pirate"?

4. The ISPs would bear the cost of policing and enforcing this ridiculous measure. Bizarre, given that they are not held responsible for anything else that occurs on their networks. Should we also prosecute them as accessories to every stalker out there, or every football hooligan that used the web to arrange a fight?

Once again, instead of developing a viable alternative to their old business model, the copyright lobby is just trying to prop up a fundamentally unworkable system.

But this is just a delaying tactic. According to this I-can't-link-to-it-enough TechCrunch article, the labels know that recorded music will eventually be free. They're just suing people because they like the money.

Rhetoric of the Copyright Wars, pt.1: "copying is theft"

2009-10-27T21:09:00.000+01:00

There's an awful lot of misinformation in the debate on copyright. While some of it is down to a lack of understanding, much of it is propagated by copyright enforcing lobbies with the aim of muddying our perception of the issues involved.

Let's start with one of the most widely used bit of rhetoric: unauthorised copying is THEFT. aka filesharing is PIRACY, aka illegal downloading is STEALING.

None of those things are any of these things. By which I mean, whatever you think of P2P filesharing (say), it is not theft.

Theft, or stealing, is the act of removing something from someone else's possession, without permission. For an act to be stealing, you have to deprive someone of the use of their own possession.

So it's obvious that unauthorised copying does not deprive the copyright owner of the use of their intellectual property. Whether or how much it affects their further exploitation of that copyright is a separate question, but the important thing is that saying "copying is theft" is fundamentally incorrect.

But of course, the entertainment industries love to use this terminology. Because "stealing" is a much more emotive concept. Few people want to think of themselves as thieves.

So you really oughta question any message framed in this way. Because if such a core point has been skewed so deliberately, it's only reasonable to view the rest of the argument with suspicion. The IT Crowd skewered this supposed moral hysteria perfectly:

Anti-Piracy Ad from The IT Crowd

Quotes are just words, they don't MEAN anything

2009-09-03T08:46:00.001+02:00

"I'm not here to win a popularity contest."

O rilly? Is that why you took a part in edgy arthouse drama GI Joe?

Sienna Miller, in this month's GQ, clearly bamboozled as to why the world finds her vapid and irritating, rather than the big lovely she clearly feels she is.

Here's another: "It's tough to be judged all the time. It takes a very strong person to withstand that scrutiny."

Naturally, this heart-rending confessional is followed by a contradictory bit of token self-deprecation: "It's so laughable, all this talking about myself. It's so little and the world feels so big and the universe feels enormous."

Isis - Wavering Radiant (Ipecac, 2009)

2009-07-31T08:54:00.006+02:00

Now I've been nevah been one for metal, having always preferred my loud gittarrrrrrock either more spikily chaotic (Pixies, Jon Spencer) or more cerebral (Sonic Youth). But the genre's been enjoying a revival in the nook of Amsterdam where I work, so in honour of our hairy, moshing brethren, here's the acclaimed Isis.

This *is* metal: searing guitars, check; pummeling drums, check; demonic growling, check. But as metal it's less of an iron and more of a molybdenum or a vanadium.

This is metal with the same expansive, genre-bending spirit as System of a Down. It's complex, melodic stuff, and songs like Ghost Key burst out into the kind of searching organic sprawl that calls to mind stoner-rock crusaders like The Secret Machines.

Buyable from the likes of iTunes or 7 Digital.

Four Iseses out of five:

Felix Da Housecat - He Was King (Nettwerk, 2009)

2009-07-30T20:55:00.002+02:00

So, according to Mr Housecat (née Stallings), this is his "electronic pop" ablum. And I always thought Devin Dazzle was the poppiest he was gonna get.

These really aren't pop songs. Sometimes we're just talking about a slightly slower tempo of house choon. And the only cuts arranged anything like pop muzik are those in the underwhelming middle section of this rekkid, where St Etienne's Sarah Cracknell is drafted in for a few glassy vocals - skip over the unengaging We and the aimless title track.

But let's gloss over that less successful bit in the middle, because Felix has delivered elsewhere. The ablum opens with the glamorous chug (who doesn't like a chug?) of We All Wanna Be Prince; the pastiche is obvious enough that it really didn't need a title that blatant, but whatevs. Plastik Fantastik packs a solid groove, and Kickdrum is a bass-resonating, speaker-shaking, but strangely abstract party anthem.

Later on, after that weaker 3 or 4-track stretch, it's time to unleash the acid-tweakin' bodyrock of Elvi$, and the monster beats + compressed noise of LA Ravers. On these, Felix is as fierce as ever.

Ablum not yet out, but you can buy Elvi$ from iTunes.

Four kings out of a possible five, partly because Felix made one of the most collosally great dance tracks evah, and partly because do you know how hard it is to find a picture of 3.5 kings?

Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions - Through the Devil Softly (Nettwerk, 2009)

2009-07-28T09:14:00.000+02:00

Dreampop ahoy!

Hope Sandoval, once upon a time vocalist of the widely-cherished Mazzy Star, is paired up these days with My Bloody Valentine's Colm Ó Cíosóig. Through the Devil Softly is their second full-length, after 2001's Bavarian Fruit Bread. (Sandoval clearly in no rush there.)

Opener, and first single, Blanchard rises up like smoke out of a pretty, descending chord sequence, before falling into a tensely hopeful chorus that brings to mind Leonard Cohen. But as one of the more compelling tracks here, it's a shame to blow it at the start.

With Sandoval's slowcore, psychedelic background, nothing here will come as a shock. The whole thing is delivered at such a stately place, with such even, gentle playing, that there is little drama to enliven the songs. Trouble almost reaches a seedy, Lynchian, roadhouse swagger - but more representative is the drowzy, swaying tempo of tracks like Bluebird.

What's more, her voice may be more accessible, clearer than on Mazzy Star recordings, but it is so beautifully impassive that it's difficult to register much emotion. The net effect is that it becomes difficult as a listener to really focus on the music, and the ablum pushes itself into the background, as if that's where it's happiest.

It's a shame, because there is some really quite lovely music here - the pizzicato plucking of Thinking Like That, or the Kristin Hersh-alike guitar line of Wild Roses. But the overall effect is soporific, verging on the narcotic.

Not out till September - buylink to follow.

Three devils out of a possible five:

Scott Matthews - Elsewhere (Island, 2009)

2009-07-27T07:17:00.000+02:00

Scott Matthews has one of those deeply emotive, effortlessly musical voices, one that slips from soaring tenor to delicate choirboy falsetto to wounded sigh and back again, often in the space of a single line. His songs are broodingly melancholic, carved from heartbreak and lies but fashioned into a supple, swooping defiance of such things.

He has such control of timbre that his voice combines with the music like any other instrument, leaping and spiralling in tandem with intricate guitar lines, tender horns, flickering mandolin.

This set shows more focus than its predecessor, the sprawling Passing Stranger - though the mood remains mellow, there are more upbeat, anthemic cuts like the rousing Into the Firing Line. He's also dialled down on the tabla and sitar for a more varied instrumental palette that feels a notch more classic and a nudge less distinctive.

Now, Scott Matthews - much like Canada's Patrick Watson - occupies that musical territory of limber melody and sweet melancholy that's familiar to Jeff Buckley fans. This isn't an accusation of pastiche. Homage might be the wrong word too.

It's like when Elbow and Coldplay appeared, during Radiohead's post-OK Computer hiatus - both started out promisingly enough, each of them toying around with a thin sliver, a subset of elements from the Radiohead "formula". Both were good, exceedingly promising bands, but both had Radiohead's influence written all over.

Obviously it was the Mancunians who fashioned their own startlingly beautiful style from those origins, whereas the Paltrow-fanciers disappeared with phenomenal speed up their own backsides, musically-speaking.

This digression is simply here to say: originality, well yes, obviously it's highly prized in art, but originality for its own sake can also be a dead end, and building on the work of predecessors like yer Buckleys and yer 'Heads is not such a bad thing, *provided* you introduce some of your own character. That's what Matthews and Elbow have managed to do.

Whereas the likes of Coldplay and *GHAGH* Snow Patrol *UGH* cynically trawl around for passably cool influences to weld, in an ugly and cynical fashion, to the hollow abominations of their own mediocrity.

But like I was saying, this Scott Matthews ablum is well worth taking out for an impromptu picnic of fine cava and delicious cured meats.

Buy it from 7 Digital or no, I don't know why it's not on iTunes either.

A solid 4 St Elsewhere's out of 5:

United 4 Iran demo, Museumplein, Saturday 25th July

2009-07-26T12:17:00.004+02:00

Museumplein yesterday for a demonstration to show solidarity with the people of Iran. A few thousand had probably turned up, the vast majority Iranian expats or exiles, but with a healthy Dutch/international showing. It was probably the most glamorous demo I've seen, with many Persian women displaying a fondness for make-up and movie star sunglasses.

You'll see from the photos that there was a mix of Iranian flags on display: the plain colours of the Iranian flag; and the old, pre-Islamic Revolution, Shah's flag, which also has a central emblem of a lion, a sword, and behind them the rays of the sun.

Now I'm not a believer in the inherited power or divine right of Shahs or Kings or whoever. But at the end of the demo, some of the organisers were asking people to furl up the old Shah's flag.

Why? Surely the point of this event was to give a say to those who disagree with Ahmedinejad's abuses of power. To give a voice to *all* the people of Iran who've been hurt by the recent electoral fraud. United. United against the current corrupt ruler.

The organisers wore United 4 Iran t-shirts, and wore plenty of green - the colour of Mousavi's supporters. Those who were returning to Iran soon claimed to be afraid of reprisals, and feared that association with the Shah's flag would put them in danger. But how could that make things worse given that they were already present at the event, promoting United 4 Iran, and wearing green? Wouldn't that be enough to put them in danger?

Sadly, it probably would - there were many people who were obviously also planning to return to Iran at some point, who covered their faces with masks. If the organisers were that worried about being in danger because of being seen at the event, why didn't they wear masks too?

You have to wonder whether this wasn't in fact motivated by a desire to remove the icons of support for the Shah, in order to make the event look more homogenous - more pro-Mousavi, perhaps. Most of the speakers focussed on the common enemy, the dictator, though one Dutch politician seemed hung up on Mousavi, and the people being behind him. But I'd guess that half of the crowd - including the family of a friend of mine - were waving the Shah's flag.

The civil rights movement in Iran is, surely, not simply about denying Ahmedinejad power in order to award it straight to Mousavi. It's about having a fair election. And if you're going to bill your event as *United* 4 Iran, then by definition you should allow a variety of voices to be heard (and flags to be seen).

Of course, I'm an outsider. But if people thought they'd put themselves in danger, I can't see that the presence of Shah's flag made things any worse than organising the demo in the first place.

Still, still and all, it was great to see Museumplein thronged with people giving voice to the Iranian people's - and the world's - concern with the supression of democracy in Iran.

Currently Reading: 2666 and more

2009-07-25T11:05:00.000+02:00

White Denim - Fits (Full Time Hobby, 2009)

2009-07-23T09:45:00.001+02:00

This is a frantic, garrulous, garage rock rekkid, packed with tight jams like only a power trio can.

Actually garage is a bit of a misnomer, since the band still records in a caravan. And while most of the songs here fall short of the 3-minute mark, it doesn't mean they're without ambition.

Because while White Denim rock in a garagey vein, they also flow through some very psychedelic arteries. There are dramatic shifts in tempo or tone in almost every track. Check the Spanish verse of El Hard Attack Dcwyw, which inevitably calls to mind Pixies, just before the track veers off into a blues-rock throwdown.

Some careful sequencing keeps this from descending into stylistic mess. The band rocks hard through the first half of the ablum, right up to frenetic single I Start to Run. The second half showcases the breezier, more melodic side to their songwriting, on cuts like the Can- and Cream-channeling Mirrored & Reverse, the swooping, swooning, Regina Holding Hands, and the expansive, brooding/tender Syncn (sic).

Buy it from iTunes or Rough Trade why not?

Four pale jeans out of five:

final scene for our FIFA shoot

2009-07-07T21:49:00.001+02:00

Nearly done! It's been a hard few weeks, and there's a helluva lot to do when we get back to A'dam. Soon: beers.

- Posted using Mobypicture.com

What's up with yer banner media buy, Comedy Central?

2009-06-12T22:18:00.000+02:00

Phenomenomenal animation by Logan for NASA

2009-06-10T23:10:00.001+02:00

reading: joan didion, a book of common prayer

2009-05-22T14:40:00.001+02:00

- Posted using Mobypicture.com

James Yuill/Filthy Dukes @ Paradiso, Amsterdam, Thursday 30th April

2009-05-15T17:22:00.000+02:00

Yep, 30th April - Koninginnedag. It's frankly an achievement that I was still standing by the time James came onstage at 00.30, since K'dag (Queen's Day) is a Dutch holiday with an emphasis on drunken lunacy, and that day we kicked off at 1pm. I'm a lightweight as it is...

So, London Calling at Paradiso on K'dag was a more frayed affair than usual, with most of the crowd having overindulged both the night before (Koninginnenacht) and then throughout the day on the 30th.

(Image by Dennis Stempher @ flickr. We're grooving in the crowd, back near that third point on the balcony.)

Filthy Dukes' uncomplicated block-rockin' tunes were just the ticket. Shame we didn't get to hear Tupac Robot Club Rock live, but mebbe frontman Tim Lawton isn't up to all the rap singing involved. No matter, I've got a lot more into the ablum since the last time I saw them live, and so this rocked my inflatable orange boat, Messages and What Happens Next in particular setting the dancefloor a-bounce.

And Mr Yuill turned in another spankingly good set, wringing cut-up concrete beats and searing synth lines out of an endearingly modest set-up of latop and analogue synths. Great to see the self-effacing, very English demeanour that he has offstage somehow working for him onstage too. He switches easily from heartfelt vocals to delicate fingerpicking to cranking out the electro jams, and his appeal lies in the way he so seamlessly merges a sensitive folky sensibility with a yen for phat beats and glitchy mayhem. He was playing Fabric the day after this set, would be ace to catch his club set sometime.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs @ Paradiso Amsterdam, Weds 29th April

2009-05-12T13:43:00.001+02:00

(Photo from Dennis Stempher's Flickrset.)

Some people are just born to RAWK, and Karen O is one of them. At Paradiso a coupla weeks back, she purred, she howled, she prowled around the stage. She dressed in a baffling sequence of alien-punk outfits, the freakiest of which was a neon-swirled facemask she wore throughout the first song of the encore, that looked like Gatecrasher fetish gear.

Now I'm not a card-carrying YYYs fan, but this was always gonna be a show worth seeing. Latest ablum It's Blitz! is ferkin great, an assured development of their sound; whereas disappointing sophomore effort Show Your Bones was a lazy babystep on from their debut, recycling fragments of Love and Rockets (some say) and LL Cool J (FFS) along the way.

So, anyways, Paradiso. From the first song, Karen's raucous wail and Nick Zinner's whiplash guitar going head to head in a battle of the rockingest. Much of the set is delivered as a four-piece, with a guitarist/keyboardist bolstering up the sound. The Show Your Bones material fared better than I expected, but it was the new songs where the band works best four-strong. Heads Will Roll was positively searing, while Zero pushed beyond anthemic into mammoth.

But I was kinda most keen to see them kick out some of the older jams, back to the guitar-drums-voice line up of their debut material. Brian Chase whips and cajoles a jazzy clatter from the drums, while Zinner shreds a maelstrom from his strings. The three lock in so tightly, there's no need for much adornment. Songs like Y Control and Pin burst out into the audience like coiled cobras... but cobras whose venom has been replaced by vodka. Um, or something.

Karen O was mesmerising. You don't want to take your eyes off her, in case you miss another manic grin or one of those spectacular, rock couture-meets-kabuki theatre poses. Towards the end of the main set she donned a leather jacket, and spun round to reveal her initials embossed on the back.

KO. Knockout fo' sho'.

Peter Björn and John - Living Thing (Wichita, 2009)

2009-04-23T09:47:00.003+02:00

Got a conceptual problem with this one. On Writer's Block, PBJ turned in a few indie pop classics - but the ablum contained a lot of abrasive filler. Here, they've stripped their songs down to bare bones. It makes for odd pop.

After all, space is not a familiar feature of pop sounds. Jazz, yes; classical; techno. You get space when there's something so compelling going on that it needs room to breathe. Lykke Li (whose debut was produced by the Björn in PBJ) gets away with it because her voice, while too cutesy for some, is strong enough to carry the songs.

Not the case with PBJ's vocals, nor with their musicianship, neither of which are scintillating enough to hold the attention.

Nothing to Worry About is lifted by its evil kids choir and the catchiness of their chant - though it borrows slightly from PBJ's own Amsterdam. The title track channels Paul Simon's Gracelands to middling effect. Then Lay It Down earns points for the chorus:

Hey, shut the fuck up boy
You are really starting to piss me off.

But these are the tracks that do flesh out the bones of the songs, the ones that seem less beholden to the ablum's ethos.

It's good to see someone try something original, so points for that. But as a listening experience, underwhelming.

Disagree in the comment box or by buying this dead Living Thing at iTunes.

Three Picassos out of five:

Bat for Lashes - Two Suns (2009)

2009-04-22T21:19:00.001+02:00

(Photo by Holly Erskine, via Drowned in Sound.)

Welcome back, Natasha Khan - or "Pearl", the pseudonym she adopted for this supposed concept ablum. That brilliant debut was no fluke. The girl has music in her bones.

It's populated with folkloric characters and dreamlike narratives. A voice that switches from ethereal to visceral in the twitch of a feathered headdress. Pianos that chime in dark simplicity while all manner of percussion clatters chaotically around.

Khan must have worked hard to ensure this follow-up is as accomplished as it is. It's confident, assured music-making that - despite the plaudits strewn in her path for Fur & Gold - never lapses into second-ablum laziness or cocksurety.

The crude synths of tracks like Daniel, and wider use of sequencing, points to a guarded evolution in the BFL sound. And those analogue synths, primitive as they are, do hark back to the 80's, something that will likely only increase the comparisons to Kate Bush.

But Natasha Khan is an original, whatever lazy comparisons we drag out. For me, it's great to hear so many contradictions, the tensions between the passion of her delivery and the almost chilly virtuosity of her voice; the archaic content of her lyrics and the modernity of her approach; the delicate instrumentation that floats on pounding, rolling waves of drumming.

Two Suns is a mesmeric, absorbing work, and a surefooted step forward. It's delicious to hear the choral nature of Khan's songs explored more fully on Peace of Mind, and to hear that tribal heartbeat to her songwriting pushed to thrilling new levels on the propulsive Pearl's Dream.

Straight into the "ablums fo teh yaer" pile. Buy it from the Jobs.

Five pearls out of five:

Comedy Central: one day, all television will be this way.

2009-04-22T10:09:00.000+02:00

This spot made me really happy:

For yonks I've been evangelising about ComedyCentral.com, where you can catch up on the last fortnight's Daily Show and Colbert Report, and where, incredibly, you can watch every single episode of South Park.

The programmes are delivered in a straightforward browser-based player, and in a 30min show (more like 23, being that these are US progs) you'll see 2-3 individual adverts of 30" or less. Now, I know not everyone is ready to ditch their TV in favour of a computer monitor, but I can testify that a 21" iMac is perfectly watchable as far as I'm concerned. The sheer convenience of it is what wins out for me, never having been a resolution Nazi.

There are plenty of online sites - Sidereel, TV Shack, et al - where it's possible to stream TV that's been uploaded to other sites. But I'd rather stream direct from the programme makers, paying the "price" of seeing a few ads in exchange for better, more reliable streams. Watching Comedy Central shows via any other website than ComedyCentral.com would just be dumb.

But until now, the one dumb part about this has been targetting. The Daily Show has been accompanied by ads for US restaurant chains or auto ads. What a waste of media spend, playing US-targetted ads to viewers in the Netherlands!

So, like I say, this ad made me smile. OK, it might only be a station ident, but it shows that Comedy Central are trying to make the smartest use of this new media space. Please, other advertisers: join in. Because then the market will be there to deliver more and more TV, with all the availability and control familiar from the land of the intertron.

Computer screens and TV sets are bound to converge - with monitors turning into flat screens, and TV sets (eventually) incorporating web access and browsing functionality. In fact, what's the point of broadcast TV at all? Isn't the web a far mroe convenient way to deliver programming? Yes, you know it is.

There's two trends g'wanning on here. One is the move to The Cloud. Who needs to buy South Park DVDs when you can watch them all online? The idea of ownership of cultural artifacts like movies and music is replaced by the idea of access to... everything.

The access doesn't come for free, of course. But who minds a few ads here or there for such a freakin' amazing service?! Like Spotify (sadly not available here yet), the ads just make you appreciate that someone is finding a way to make this stuff work.

Moreover, these services compete directly with P2P networks. I don't want to fileshare episodes of South Park, for the makers to be unable to profit, and for me to be moving all that data around and have it take up space on my computer. Not when I can get more convenient access to the same material for the price of 40" of my time spent watching ads.

Yuksek - Away from the Sea (Universal/Barclay, 2009)

2009-04-21T09:34:00.002+02:00

The French do know their way around a slab of prime electro. Case in point: Pierre-Alexandre Busson, aka Yuksek.

On Away from the Sea he splashes around in the wake of Daft Punk and Justice, with a poppier ear, but the same love of chunky, funky beats. Hip-hop rhythms are dished out with clinical precision, techno beats are deliciously dirty.

All the excitement is loaded up in the first half of the ablum: scythe-sharp cut+paste opener Break Ya, the anthemic, punk-attitude Extraball, the galloping Take a Ride.

His remixes are unfailingly ace. But here, over a whole ablum's worth of original material, things begin to dip into slight anonymity towards the end (a danger for dance acts when melody is a stronger suit than groundbreaking production). The Chromeo collaboration, for one, feels unnecessary, and it lacks the bizarro charm of the shouty So Far Away from the Sea, say.

Howevs, this is a strong set with plenty of highlights: tuneful and eminently danceable.

Buy Away from the Sea.

Coupla fine Yuksek remixes over at Rollin' & Scratchin'.

Four extra balls out of five:

sketch: bread served in lego

2009-04-10T11:54:00.001+02:00

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Room at the Sanderson, London

2009-04-09T21:11:00.001+02:00

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U2 manager Paul McGuinness talking merde in Le Figaro

2009-04-09T17:14:00.001+02:00

U2 manager Paul McGuinness has been vocal in the last few years about the evils of "piracy", and this week, in an article for the right-wing French newspaper Le Figaro (republished here by The Guardian), he applauds France's new creation and internet law.

It's a move New Zealand thankfully backed down from, and Canada too has flirted with the idea. In practise, it gives copyright owners the right to demand user information from ISPs, and then to decide who should be disconnected from the net.

Privacy issues are a concern. And it's nothing short of staggering that copyright owners will be able to disconnect internet users with no burden of proof, or recourse to appeal for the disconnected. So for McGuinness to call this "the right solution", "a fair and balanced solution", one he believes "will work in practice"... boy it's angryficating.

His arguments are weak-sauce. There are plenty of other prospects for a new system to generate music revenues - ad-supported models, blanket fees, copyright taxes on technology, even - many of which are flawed, but ALL of which are preferable to the new French approach of unverified allegations triggering unfair sanctions. But McG dismisses these other models as "solutions produced for the laboratory, not for the market place". Balls, in a word.

Sound recordings used to have a lot of value - they were expensive to produce, duplicate, and distribute. Now that it's incredibly cheap to do this, the value is vastly reduced. But McG believes that an item which has lost a great deal of its value should still retail for the same price.

According to a recent TechCrunch article, major label executives have faced up to the obvious and, off the record at least, are willing to admit that recorded music is moving towards a price point of zero, that it will become a promotional tool for touring and merchandise. This more accurately reflects the true costs of distributing sound recordings; it just doesn't maintain the profits that copyright owners have taken for granted.

France's new law is not a progressive or "enlightened" step - it is wholly reactionary, an attempt to prop up an increasingly unworkable system of copyright that desperately needs to adapt.

By claiming that France now has "the moral high ground" in this debate, McGuinness just makes himself look a pompous ass. Like Canute, he believes bombast and disingenuous rhetoric can reverse the inevitable.

Copyright laws came into being for two reasons: to prevent unauthorised COMMERCIAL exploitation of intellectual property, and to stimulate creativity by giving authors a way to make money. They were not drafted solely to make money for commercial entities, yet that is what drives people like McGuinness and Metallica. U2, let's not forget, moved much of their fiscal affairs out of Ireland: for the tax breaks (a must-read article from Marina Hyde).

Oh, and that photo at the top? Pauls McGuinness and Hewson campaigning for an extension to copyright, ANOTHER proposal that independent analysts argued would only help corporations and the top, top entertainment earners; a proposal that would, they said, stifle creativity and do next to nothing for the vast majority of songwriters. Lobbying mofos, man, they dangerous.

Giant corn dogs

2009-04-07T09:49:00.000+02:00

Always thought of the Pet Shop Boys as quite a subtle pop group, y'know, all arch and ironic and not so much with the blatant and direct.

Then, while in the gym, I see the end of their promo for Love Etc.. This animated clip brings together Gilbert & George and Pac-Man (finally! I hear you cry). As the Pet Shop Boys, with wheels where their bodies should be, bounce past, we see a parade of long pink tubes that sparkle and, erm, become tumescent:

I mean, what the hell else *could* they be? Giant corn dogs, maybe.

"Love Etc."? "Knobs Etc.", more like.

James Yuill / Peter Björn & John, Melkweg Amsterdam, Thurs 26th March

2009-04-05T21:18:00.000+02:00

Another late write-up! Melkweg, the Amsterdam venue with the dumbest coat check. They made it accessible from all sides, but the flow of traffic cuts across your path whichever way you're going. Fabric in London has a similar problem with some stairs near the toilets, everyone goes in opposite directions, creating more of a jam than you'd expect given the space.

Y'know, just in case there are any architects listening.

What's that? Oh yes, the music concert gig. A great set from James Yuill, sweet folk tunes and crunchy, glitch-ridden rhythms welded together with a bracing dose of self-deprecating Englishness. He asks the audience to decide how This Sweet Love should sound - acoustic or beat version? But at the crowd's incomprehensible roar he changes his mind and jogs through it acoustically.

Yuill plays at Fabric on 1st May, a guitar-less set that will be well worth seeing (if y're in London).

But next up was the much lauded, always applauded, Peter Björn and John. They started out with bass, single-finger keyboards, and a small drum kit that blended real snare with electric doo-doo-dug-a-dug tom-toms. Challenging, we thought, will be interesting to see how this grows and develops.

It didn't develop. It wasn't interesting. I mean, a bit of guitar in places, but only ever the three of them, and this painfully dull, bare bones chassis of pop sound.

No, I'm not against a bit of experimentation. But it works when it's in service of the song. Björk can strip a song down to the barest of elements because her melodies are so beguiling, her vocals so otherworldly. But these songs were starving, desperate for a nourishing chunk of harmony or a tasty sliver of sonic variation. And, for me, Morén's voice doesn't have the warmth or depth for such close inspection.

Expecting at least a decent show, I found myself chatting to friends at the bar and ignoring the set - something I almost never do. Most of the crowd was in a similar state of disinterest.

How dull? We left as they started to play Young Folks.

Two Foot Yard, Bimhuis Amsterdam, Weds 25th March

2009-04-04T18:04:00.003+02:00

Been baaad with the blogging, the last coupla weeks. 's terrible.

So, an editor friend from Time Out A'dam had a spare ticket for a concert at the Bimhuis. It's part of the Muziek Gebouw aan het IJ (Music Building on the IJ), which looks out across the fat swatch of grey-brown river at the north of the city. That makes it sound less great than it is, it actually gives a fantastic view of the city skyline (several stories below the skylines of most cities). We were seeing the jazz/alternative chamber trio Two Foot Yard:

(Pic from mmpicture's fine photostream.)

Intriguing. Their playing is virtuosic, and band leader Carla Kihlstedt's voice is positively acrobatic - from this they weave impulsive, sprawling compositions, all stop:start surges and gleeful complexity. Lyrics are heavily poetic, and for all this may sound an aridly cerebral set-up, their songs can pack an emotional punch.

Between-song banter flips from witty to surreal to earnest liberal orthodoxy. Obama v Bush and anti-war comments are as well-received as you would expect, though an anti-Israel statement draws a pensive silence from the crowd rather than knee-jerk agreement.

One song was supposedly written for Kentucky Fried Chicken's mythical "animal 26", which according to urban legend is a creature modified to such a horrifying extent that it can no longer be called a chicken. Dunno, if you're going to attack targets like that, why not make valid arguments rather than propogating the verifiably untrue? Lawd knows, there's enough wrong with KFC's practices that you shouldn't need to resort to propoganda.

Anyways, I digress: 2 Foot Yard are deep-fried with adroit musicianship and crispy-coated in the secret spices of adventurousness. Here's a vidclip:

"Things that you say disappear."

2009-04-04T16:04:00.000+02:00

Galatea 2.2, discussing Blake's Poison Tree with a developing mind:

"Things that you say disappear."
"And things you don't say...?"
"Things you don't say get bigger."
Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to.

beer in a champagne glass

2009-04-03T20:19:00.001+02:00

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#Fromthebalcony

2009-03-21T18:07:00.001+01:00

@matt_j_kendall *

* Twitter @, not "at" @...

redhead pic back from the framer

2009-03-20T11:23:00.002+01:00

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Nerdcore will never die!

2009-03-18T19:18:00.000+01:00

The Ocarina of Rhyme: dope cuts from Zelda all jiggled up with some nerdgasmic hip-hop joints. Marvel! as classics like Goron Village or Great Fairy's Fountain share bodily fluids with superluminaries like Aesop Rock, Clipse, MF Doom, and the FREAKIN' ACE! Spank Rock.

Pharrell, humble janitor and part-time billionaire

2009-03-18T09:45:00.001+01:00

Ooh look, a new video from N*E*R*D! "Sooner or later it all comes crashing down," they warble:

Pharrell the janitor humbly sweeps his way through a panic-gripped stock exchange, raising an eyebrow that is wise and knowing and, at the same time, modestly aware of his own superhuman levels of hotness AND coolness. He looks with a mixture of pity and schadenfreude at those sorry, square-ass bankers, in a devastatingly simple critique of the global credit crisis.

Erm, isn't this the same Pharrell of the BILLIONAIRE BOY'S CLUB?

Feck, but that brand of his always riled. So typical of that nauseating, self-congratulatory, consumption-fixated streak in hip-hop. But no, Pharrell, you go ahead with your cynical appropriation of the credit crisis to reposition yourself as some wiser-than-thou, woe-is-us, man of the people... rather than the inane, cash 'n' glory-fixated hipster that you've always been.

"N*E*R*D hasn't released a decent tune since their debut ablum." Discuss.

Galatea 2.2

2009-03-16T08:35:00.001+01:00

Richard Powers's novel Galatea 2.2 is (so far) a deft exploration of cognitive science and the development of artifical intelligence. Given the sci-fi-ish conceit, it's packed with informational nuggets that are by turns fascinating and, well, dispiriting - such as this from a discussion on "input layer sizes" (i.e. number of neurodes processing external information):

"The better it is at generalizing, the worse it is at acquiring new associations? ... Does it follow that the more facts it has, the harder it is to take in new facts?"
"Thirty-five is about when that starts to happen, Marcel. You begin to think, 'Well, I more or less understand how things work. Do I really want to dissassemble tens of thousands of tangled, semiaccurate beliefs on the off chance that I might be able to bring one small receptor field into better focus?'"

Aw jeez. Thirty-five?! So this is the year my brain ossifies? No more learning, no more new hobbies? I *was* planning to learn how to play Baccarat and speak Maritime sign language.

White Lies, Melkweg Amsterdam, Tuesday 10th March

2009-03-10T11:28:00.002+01:00

Utterly post-punk, which to be honest is how I like my indie-style rock. Anthemic, surging, packed with equal amounts quotidian angst and the darker end of catchy tunesmithery. Rattling bass, pounding drums, trebly shocks of guitar. The singer's strident tenor will remind you of Echo & The Bunnymen, U2, and yeah, Joy Division.

A new Editors? Don't *yet* hear enough subtlety or dynamism to reach beyond that fate, though very hard to say from this short set. Come to mention it, that was welcome: they said "this is our last song" and meant it, no compulsory encore for these lads, no fake exit with amps left buzzing. Not yet, anyways.

But this was a solidly entertaining gig - the Melkweg was rammed, we could only squeeze ourselves in by the bar - and it sounds like the ablum will be worth a spin.

Psapp @ Paradiso Bovenzaal, Amsterdam, Friday 6th March

2009-03-08T23:00:00.001+01:00

The nicely barmy Psapp went down well in the Bovenzaal on Friday night. The room was packed with Dutch admirers of their melodic, syncopated alt.pop. It's subtle, pleasant stuff, so not what you would (if you were a twatamuffin) call "paradigm shattering", but still a thoroughly enjoyable set.

So there was the baffling Dutch phenomenon of people chatting for the entirety of the set, but all in all the band had a fairly responsive crowd. I mentioned to the singer, Galia, that they were lucky in this respect, since crowds in Amsterdam can lean towards the unresponsive. At School of Seven Bells earlier in the week, the (beautiful and way cool) singer had asked "so what's going on afterwards then?" That enquiry, foolishly, was met by a roomful of shuffling feet and disinterested stares. That was a Tuesday night, I s'pose.

Thanks to the lovely folk from Chrysalis for a great night out... um yeah, this was a work-related jolly, Psapp being one of those bands that are oh so synchable (i.e. perfect for soundtracks). Just doing me job.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums @ De Smet, Amsterdam, Thursday 5th March

2009-03-07T17:58:00.000+01:00

Crikey, a gig *not* in the Paradiso Bovenzaal? Freaky.

De Smet is a small bar with a decent smallish live room. The square layout gives everyone a good view, particularly the cameras that film these "3 voor 12" gigs for I-know-not-what Dutch TV station. They also broadcast the first 3 songs of each of the 3 sets live on the radio.

Let's skip over the first act (Finnish emo kids who were more focussed on pulling wildrock'n'rollstageface than the music) - we were at De Smets to catch Wildbirds & Peacedrums. I'd heard the end of their set when they supported Lykke Li at Paradiso, and wished I'd heard more.

Two Swedes. The girl sings, wild, bluesy, and raw. The boy drums, primal, elemental. There were brief appearances from a steel drum, a basic synth loop, and a zither. Here's the zither:

They were... bewitching. Compelling. If either were in another band they'd be stealing the show, but with just the two of them it works. Somehow. Live, her direct blast of emotion fits perfectly with the fascinating complexity of his drumming. I don't know if this will be too repetitive or challenging on rekkid, but they are definitely one to catch live.

Them Wildbirds were followed by Mikachu & the Shapes. Looked about thirteen. String tied around the barely-tuned guitar, damping the strings. Two drummers who played kazoo on about half the songs. The most pleasant atonal mess I've ever heard. Really quite mental.

picture back from the framer

2009-03-07T15:53:00.003+01:00

Spieren van het hoofd.

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School of Seven Bells @ Paradiso, Amsterdam, Tuesday 3rd March

2009-03-04T23:44:00.000+01:00

Oh, wow. So Alpinisms, the ablum, is an intriguing dose, all gauzy guitars and shimmering synths, and some sweet tuneage hammered relentlessly home with judicious looping. Lee Enormous Yes (eventually) reviews it here. (But "second-rate Garbage"?! How dare you.)

So, SOSB live: they were comfortably on the ace side of good. The voices of the Dehaza twins intertwine with an almost religious beauty (leaving their cool as! boho stylings and more worldly beauty to one side for a minute). Ben Curtis's guitar, more prominent here than on the rekkid, washes waves of blissful fuzz over us all; his six strongs poppier than when deployed for Secret Machines, but no less glorious.

A bit of drum machine might work on the record, an angularity that fits. But they're much warmer live - Alejandra's guitar (I *think* it was Alejandra) dovetailing with Curtis's distorted sprawl - and a good live drummer would have suited them much better. Now doubt one will come; this tour seems hot on the heels of a Secret Machines jaunt around Europe.

Highlights? Iamundernodisguise, Wired for Light, and a song sung in Spanish that I can't now identify. D'oh.

Goseethemgoseethemgoseethem.

Metadata

2009-03-03T09:03:00.000+01:00

There's room on an mp3 for a bunch of metadata. But much of the music I buy from iTunes doesn't even have composer names.

How about Record Label and Publisher info? What about lyrics, fercrissakes? A little blurb on where the ablum was recorded, who the producer was - all the liner notes that people used to pore over on an LP or CD cover.

Eejits.

DMCA takedown stupidity

2009-03-01T23:59:00.000+01:00

Received a DMCA takedown email a few weeks ago. Now, I have no problem with the Record Company trying to get non-kosher links to their content taken down. The label is an indie based in Europe, and they're good guys. They have some great music.

The blogpost, according to habit, contained a "buylink" where users can buy either a download or CD copy. (This was actually about a pre-release copy the Record Co. had sent me, so in this case the buylink went to a page where the release would be available a few days later.)

Scanning some other blogposts about the band, I found one blogger who'd linked to a download of one of the tracks. It was an unsecure link, so i assumed it was legit. Why would you use unsecured links for a track download, if you didn't want anyone to be able to access it?

Anyways, I from the DMCA takedown note I cunningly deduced that the download link was therefore probably *not* meant for public consumption, and I immediately removed it. The buylink stayed there, and by this time the EP was available to buy.

But then I received a second DMCA takedown notification a few days ago. Despite the fact that the post no longer contained the UNWITTINGLY ILLEGIT download link, they removed the post.

WTF?! So, they took down a post that was now doing nothing more than encouraging people to buy the EP!

I'll be filing a counterclaim, pointing out the stupidity of the process. Hilariously, these notices are posted by a service called CHILLINGEFFECTS(dot)org. You'd think they were fighting AIDS with a name like that.

Woah, it's March already?!

2009-03-01T13:32:00.002+01:00

This means spring. Huzzah! Start of a month, time to take stock of how the NY resolutions are panning out. They were part of a year-long plan rather than a short-term fix, so let's see how we're going.

THE WORK COMES FIRST
Not too far from relaunching our work blog - ace. Couple of little copywriting projects at work - ace. Do a good job with the current brief, keep talking to people for their invaluable advice; let's see where this leads.

WRITING
Due to a chronic inability to book vacation, I had 45 days holiday at the start of the year, 20 of those days carried over from the last coupla years. So I've booked off every Friday for the next few months, to have the time to knuckle down and get some short stories writtened. Which is *starting* to happen. So good enough, but still need to do much, much more.

READING LIKE IT'S GOING OUT OF FASHION
Yep, I'm hammering the Amazon account (English language books being pretty expensive in the Netherlands). Heaps o' fiction to stimulate that there writing; plenty o' non-fiction in areas I need to know more about.

BUY AN ANCHOR
Gorramnit, though I had this one done - a friend spotted one for me, and I've emailed the seller but not heard back. Need to chase that dude the feck up!

THE EATING OF GOOD THINGS
Fruit by the bucketload, fresh veg, cooking at home; number of takeaways is steadily dwindling. Alrighty then!

HEALTHY EXERCISE-TYPE GUBBINS
Still doing Bikram yoga, and have barely drunk in the last fortnight. Have a March running challenge with a workmate on Nike+. If I can keep this up it'll be good.

NOT PREVARICATING
Getting there. Am dealing with difficult or just plain annoying life-stuff when it happens, rather than burying it and hoping it'll disappear of its own accord.

BECOMING A POKER DEMON
Um, oh dear. Finally got down to the casino last week, and played like a total cretin. The rebuy tourneys are too much about the depth of your wallet rather than mad poker skillz. But found out they have a freeze-out tourney on Thursdays. I'll give it a while but may try this; the buy-in is bigger, but this would suit me much better - you win by outplaying people, you don't get a leg-up just by outspending them.

ESPAÑOL & NEDERLANDS
Back to Dutch lessons: goed. Not heard back from prospective Spanish teacher, but haven't sorted out a time yet: así-así.

All in all then: moderately sunny. 19% chance of precipitation. North-westerly, bonzer.

Asobi Seksu @ Paradiso, Friday 20th Feb '09

2009-02-24T19:43:00.002+01:00

(Mooi foto van Reinier.)

A fine set from Asobi Seksu in the deliciously intimate Bovenzaal at Paradiso. It was great to hear the poppy-synthy new material, but I felt the guitar-heavier Citrus songs still worked best. A few spins of the new ablum should clear up if that's really the case.

The highlight was probably the squalling freakout at the end, when Yuki the singer took to the drums, and the drummer hunched over a bank of effects pedals for some knob-twiddling (leave it) mayhem.

Weird to be at a gig without a beer in hand - after having a wisdom tooth out there was too much bleeding going on to have any alcohol. See, a month ago when Buraka Som Sistema played I was a few sheets to the wind, and charged up to the band afterwards to rant my appreciation into their confused Portuguese faces.

But at the end of the Asobi set, after nothing more than a few sips of fizzy water, I saw the diminutive but hugely cool Yuki at the merchandise stand (well, desk) and the best I could manage was a muttered "thanks" that conveyed feck all enthusiasm.

Alcohol = the great facilitator. Call it Englishness.

Oh! Warner Music Group, what were ya thinking?

2009-02-23T22:53:00.005+01:00

This started out as a post about hip-hop's love of money, under the snappy title "Cash Rules Everything Around Me, C.R.E.A.M., get the money, dollar dollar bill y'all". It was going to tie in to my own juvenile hatred of selling out, how that was a reaction to the era I grew up in (the vile Loadsamoney 80's), cemented by my early 90's love of indie, and how it took a while to shift that attitude. (FYI, I've worked in advertising since I left college: go figure.)

The post was going to route back to my yen for Wiley's Money in My Pocket, how it's a great pop tune, but that I still have residual antipathy towards it's cash-centric message.

But instead it's become a post about major label idiocy. See, Atlantic Records (Warner Music Group) made a competition out of the Wiley video, asking people in offices to remake the Wiley video themselves, and post the results to YouTube.

Anyways, I'm starting my Ca$h post when I find that WMG has pulled the official Wiley video from YouTube. Leaving only a few - let's be honest - inferior competition entries in its place.

So: you use YouTube for your competition... then you start ripping down the official vid. Leaving people watching substandard (no offence) remakes instead.

Is that some twisted policy, or does the internet-policing hand not know what the competition hand is doing?

Eejits.

Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende

2009-02-21T13:24:00.000+01:00

The "petty rigid bourgeois" Jan Peter Balkenende (left);
Office nightmare Dwight Shrute (right).

Jaydiohead download

2009-02-20T17:00:00.001+01:00

Y'all have heard the Jay-Z/Radiohead mashup ablum, right?

House of Dumbass Lyrics: Issues by The Saturdays

2009-02-20T08:46:00.003+01:00

Me and my heart we've got issues
Don't know if I should hate you or miss you.
Damn I wish that I could resist you,
Can't decide if I should stab you or kiss you.

What makes this so teeth-mashingly awful is the stage-school enunciation and glazed, emotionless delivery. The last line carries all the murderous rage usually associated with making a nice cup of tea. Perhaps scarier is the prospect that the girls would be capable of shivving a boyfriend before calmly resuming their manicure and the second half of Celebrity Big Brother.

In many ways, the finest work of The Saturdays was probably the ablum cover photo shoot. Instead of listening to the ablum, why not just look at this picture while playing a kazoo and hitting yourself over the head with a knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag?

Battlestar GalWTFtica: Season 4 Restart

2009-02-19T22:21:00.000+01:00

S04 went into hiatus after the ever-diminishing human fleet, and its new band of Cylon allies, finally located Earth. In a Planet of the Apes-style rug-pulling act, when they got down to the surface of the Promised Land planet it was a nuke-blasted wasteland.

"What have they done," growled Admiral Adama. You can say that again. End there, for frak's sake. Most of the 3rd and 3th Seasons had been positively barmy with random reversals, story-disembowelling revelations, and nonsensical character arcs.

Like Heroes, BSG relies way too much on "destiny", aka arbitrary story goals that don't need to be justified. They also are both over-dependent on heavy repetition of a couple of stock scenes: in BSG's case, the gunpoint stand-off between characters who are ostensibly on the same side.

Once started, I have trouble NOT following terrible TV series', novels too, so now that they've completed the original goal (albeit unsatisfactorily), and are following a plot that seems to have been written by a Magic 8-Ball, this might be my chance to make a clean break.

Hmm. Anyone seen Joss Whedon's Dollhouse yet?

The Killers - Day and Age (Island, 2008)

2009-02-18T09:49:00.000+01:00

Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear. This is not good.

Hot Fuss was brilliant, it bounced along with infectious enthusiasm and was catchy as all hell. Then the try-too-hard Sam's Town was a lunge at the touchstones of Bruce Springsteen and U2; it was less than brilliant.

Now, chhrr-rist knows what style they're trying to appropriate. Human and Neon Tiger sound like lame stabs at MGMT, only without the psychedelic ornamentation (i.e. what's the point?). The whole ablum is a mess, with flashes of funky early-80's Bowie and Talking Heads, earnestly overwrought balladry, baroque pop. Some of these songs could have been written by Microsoft's phenomenally naff Songsmith.

The whole thing is just too damn serious, where Hot Fuss succeeded by being fun. Worse, there's not a song goes by without a cringingly awful line or several. You already know "are we human or are we dancer", but please give a thought to the embarrassing WTFery of lines like:

Candy talks to strangers
Thinks her life's in danger
No-one gives a damn about her hair.

The big mistake, of course, was ditching the shiny, glam pop of their debut. They're just going to have to realise they have more in common with Duran Duran than the Boss.

One human dancer out of a possible five, and that's being generous:

No buylink.

Toy Fight - High Noon EP (City Slang, 2009)

2009-02-17T04:20:00.006+01:00

Une histoire charmante, this one.

Toy Fight broke up after their first ablum in order to resume studying, life, and all that. But City Slang called up wondering if they were looking for a deal, and the boys wisely decided to regroup and give it another whirl.

The High Noon EP is four slices of twee-but-frisky, modestly optimistic, happy-go-lucky indie. It's packed with wobbly guitars, barreling barroom piano, plonkety xylophomes and heaps of melody.

Fey, Belle & Sebastian-style vocals comes as standard. Being that they're from Paris I should also invoke the similarly ramshackle Herman Düne at this point.

Album to follow, EP out on the dependably excellent City Slang on 23rd Feb.

Four toys out of a possible five:

Amazing Baby - Infinite Fucking Cross EP download & Paradiso, 16th Feb

2009-02-16T14:24:00.000+01:00

Wesleyan University alumni and mates of MGMT, Amazing Baby pursue a similar alt.pop/prog path. Similar enough to comment on, anyways, but not so similar as to invite scorn.

Because their Infinite Fucking Cross is a lushlicious thing, more Fleetwood Mac than MGMT would ever dare, lacking the garagey hints of Vanwyngarden and chums. (I'm still convinced that producer Dave Fridmann contributed much of the psychedelic brilliance of Oracular Spectacular).

Go here to download their charmingly-titled Infinite Fucking Cross EP.

Or here's their MySpace.

And they play Amsterdam's Paradiso tonight. Though I can't make out if they're in a separate room from EPMD... or opening for them. That would be weird.

Headdress videotrope:

Update: EU Copyright Term Extension

2009-02-16T08:20:00.001+01:00

Ugh.

Well, the attempt in the EU to extend copyright in sound recordings to 95 years looks to be succeeding. Digital Music News (registration required) quotes the consortium UK Music:

In recommending that the current term of copyright protection for sound recordings is extended to 95 years, the committee has recognized the value of music and the importance of the work of artists, musicians and entrepreneurs.

Of course, this is balls of the highest order. Independant analysis (including reports the EU commissioned but is now ignoring!) shows that the Record Companies will benefit, while the average performer will see laughably small compensation, perhaps around the €0.50 per year mark. Yes, 50 cents.

Speaking from experience, it often seems much of the money collected "for artists and songwriters" by the major Record Labels and the royalty collection societies never finds its way to those musicians. We're moving towards a situation where the copyright-exploiting companies enjoy greater protection than the authors themselves.

IP Watch quotes a German MEP who recognises that "the ghost of the big four is behind all the recommendations we have at the moment". Howard Knopf has more on the topic over at Excess Copyright.

Morrissey - Years of Refusal (Polydor, 2009)

2009-02-15T16:38:00.001+01:00

Can someone explain what the point of Morrissey is? Scratch that. What is the point of Morrissey's backing band?

What was so deliriously brilliant about The Smiths was the perfect marriage of Morrissey's lyrical dexterity to Johnny Marr's balletically nimble guitar, the fit of his swooping vocals with such dramatic pop.

But this is hoary old guitar rock balls, with occasional random nods to variety (or this meant to be tame experimentation?). There's the bungled mariachi of When I Last Spoke to Carol, and You Were Good in Your Time's pointless coda of abstract noise and buried voices.

Everything is underpinned with Boz Boorer's bland, route one riffery. A harsh analysis might say that Moz clearly doesn't want his voice & his words to have to compete with anything else for the listener's attention. But it leaves him nothing to play off of.

Producer Roger Manning Jr wrote of this ablum's "great punk, garage, DIY urgency", but I can't think of anything less suited to Morrissey - or at least, not the Blink 182-style punk pop for which Manning is known.

It's not all *so* bad. It's Not Your Birthday Anymore manages to be much more affecting, simply by allowing the listener some space in which to enjoy Moz's still powerful pipes. Guitars come crashing in time and again, but as a surge of emotion, rather than than workmanlike chug that pervades the rest of the ablum.

Following this with the knowing You Were Good in Your Time constitutes the set's undoubted highlight. When he balances being both arch and affecting, Morrissey is still vital.

Unfortunately, most of the time the curmudgeon in him wins out. Lyrics are shot through with the usual bristly cynicism:

Life is nothing much to lose...

There so much destruction all over the world,
And all you can do is complain about me.

But WTF is he railing so spitefully against? His detractors, faux-humble QCs, wannabes..? This is hardly kicking against the pricks - rilly, if I were Moz I'd be far more worried about whether I were relevant any more.

Pop psychology pontification: in Robert Cialdini's Influence, he talks of our need for consistency, of our slavish desire to prove intellectual strength by sticking to our guns, whether or not it makes sense to do so.

In the world of rock & pop - not an arena famed for its appreciation of the process of maturation - wouldn't it be easy for the liberating cynicism of a gifted tyro to become the behavioural prison of the middle-aged man?

There's a naked man, standing laughing in your dreams
You know who it is, but you don't like what it means.

Half-decent, but since I'll have forgotten entirely about this in a few months, let's give it a 2 refusals out of 5:

Here's the iTunes buylink.

What I Need to Be Reading

2009-02-14T17:11:00.000+01:00

Where are the jokes?

2009-02-13T09:37:00.001+01:00

Flight of the Conchords season 1 was, if not solid gold, than at least most of it was a nice melty gold. By which I mean it was good.

The writing in Season 2 has been up to par, with the exception of the first episode. But what's happened to the songs? Instead of hilarious parody we get weak-sauce pastiche, and the gags have been replaced by much weaker puns.

This Magnolia/Aimee Mann homage is great, but not exactly funny:

Still, it's only a few episodes in, still time for a few classic songs.

Dear Reader - Replace Why With Funny (City Slang, 2008)

2009-02-11T09:18:00.060+01:00

A sweetly sophisticated ablum of folk-tinged alternative pop Cherilyn MacNeil and Darryl Tor, formerly known as Harris Tweed Authority. Yes, the name change was a good idea even if the Austen reference is a little twee.

Not that I want to bandy about the word twee, since there's limber drama in their songs, most notably in the "Bond anthem with a creamy doo-wop centre" of Never Goes. They credit Brent Knopf, of Portland's Menomena!, with pushing them towards this adventurousness and away from the straighter indie-folk they were peddling before.

There are interesting flourishes throughout, such as the steely vibrato strings on Bend or the "Gregorian barbershop" opening of The Same.

But the real draw here are MacNeil's delicious melodies and sweetly affecting voice, something of Aimee Mann or Ireland's Cathy Davey in her delivery. And buried in the sweetness there is usually a sharp little barb. Great White Bear - about hiding in the guts of a bear, it seems - climaxes with an addictive refrain:

Oh what a day it's been
Run! There's a bullet in your back
Run run run! There's a bullet in your back
And I would not take it back

Out at the end of last year ion City Slang in Europe; I think Rough Trade bring it to the UK on 20th Feb. And, given that Dear Reader hail from South Africa, you have to wonder if this will be unjustly passed over. Hopefully not, this is good stuffs alright.

4 readers out of 5:

Here an iTunes link for Dear Reader, but only the single at present - expect the ablum to be up after 20th Feb.

Increments

2009-02-09T09:05:00.032+01:00

And so the resolutions for this year are coming good by increments, in installments. Which was the point, my vast amorphous and ever-expanding list of this year's to-do items was never meant to be hit in one go. Lawks, no!

Wandered across the canal for a spot of hot bikram yoga on Saturday. Hot as in 40 degrees Celsius, not as in "sexy yoga" or anything ludicrous. To be honest, 90 minutes bored me a little, but given my terminally short attention span it's probably a good thing to oh look, it's stopped raining.

So once a week should do it for the sweaty stretchathon. Once a week is definitely too little for the blog, though, and I notice it's been 6 days since the last post. Grr. What's more, the CDs I want to write about are stacking up: Morrissey, Dear Reader, Toy Fight, The Organ, Lady Gaga. And I can't leave the Killers' Day and Age sitting there without giving it the shoeing it so richly deserves.

Gigs coming soon for Amazing Baby, Calvin Harris, and Leila. Need to do something about getting into those.

Elsewhere, serendipity. The lovely Lel knows I've been looking for an anchor (long story), and called me Saturday morning, from a rain-sodden Ijhalen market, to say she'd found a couple! Bless her cotton sock monkeys.

Jong Pang - Bright White Light (Tigerspring, 2008)

2009-02-03T08:58:00.058+01:00

Wonderfully confused alt.rock - or is it post rock? - from Danish indie face Anders Rhedin.

After a holiday from the Scandinavian scene, during which he dabbled in world, folk, and classical forms, Rhedin has returned to rock with the aim of incorporating those genres.

While you can see the debts to both classical and folk in a song like Explode, it's because Rhedin's new influences pull his songwriting into newer (less "classic indie") forms.

The Reichian abstraction of opener A House in Heartbeats, with its metronomic female backing vocal, also puts me in mind of the brilliant School of Language. New Order shows shades of The Shortwave Set. Rhedin's own distorted baritone gives Scream Cicada, She's Home the feel of Michael Gira's Swans (though with much less doom, apocalypse, and rape). Elsewhere, Small Cut Sensations kicks off like a female-fronted Flaming Lips.

Let's say, 4 Jongs out of a possible 5:

Thanks to Mina, here's where you can get hold of Jong Pang!

~~You know, I can't find a buylink for the life of me (was sent a copy by a music consultant, the lovely Rachel at Woodwork Music), will have to get a link up later...~~

Little Johnny Frostbite, freezing you up, freezing you down...

2009-02-02T17:02:00.001+01:00

Here's a link to my slapdash & kinda cheesy Mighty Boosh Tundra Rap? remix.

Messy but fun. Can you ID any of the other tracks? There's one supremely easy one in there.

Hitchens on media self-censorship

2009-02-01T10:08:00.040+01:00

Christopher Hitchens on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the fear-driven self-censorship practised by the media since then. He punctures the notion that to surrender free expression to anyone's (professed) notion of blasphemy is in any way a good thing:

To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more “offensive” than that?

Also, beyond my understanding at the time was the idea that the Ayatollah Khomeini could have issued the fatwa in order to reinforce his religious credentials, after an embarrassing volte face saw him sign a treaty with Iraq.

Ball of confusion

2009-01-27T09:23:00.085+01:00

Yesterday, the same as any other day...

First up, here we read that UK ISPs are opposed to file-sharing regulations. This gives the lie to Feargal Sharkey's recent assertion that a deal between the recorded music industry and the ISPs was only "weeks away".

The ISPs, let's face it, don't want the extra work of monitoring internet traffic - and there is a legitimate argument here, that they shouldn't be given the role of enforcer for the entertainment industries. But their claim that the existing copyright laws are sufficient is clearly tosh. It's not working, and the current system is outdated and outmoded...

So, over to the Isle of Man, where a proposed scheme would see a charge of £1 levied against internet users, who would then have access to unlimited music. Hmm. Interesting, in that they've fixed a very low price point for this. Feasible, in that we're only talking about the 80,000-odd inhabitants of the Isle.

What gives me pause for thought is how the reporting would be implemented, i.e. how the body collecting this money would distribute it to rights holders. Generally, the collection societies (MCPS-PRS in the UK, ASCAP or BMI in the US, BUMA-STEMRA over here in the Netherlands), on behalf of their composer & publisher members, distribute the royalties payable for recorded copies of music, live performances, and TV/radio broadcasts & c.

Recently our company took a licence to use a piece of music in a TV campaign. The Publisher mentioned that they need to give detailed media buy information (when the spot was broadcast, on what channels), in order to claim the royalties they're due. What's wrong with this picture? Well, the collection societies are meant to do just that - collect royalties, and distribute it to the correct members. But if they need the members to provide their own media info... well, it sounds like they're not doing their job. Like they can handle the collecting part, but they put the burden of work on the members when it comes to distributing royalties.

So what if the composer or publisher doesn't know their song has been used in a particular territory? This is perfectly possible for live TV broadcasts. Does that mean the collection societies will just sit on the money they collect? Isn't it their duty to distribute the money to their members - rather than put the burden of work on those members?

Anyways, anyways.

Finally, in the US, ASCAP is now apparently targetting those thinkers who are making the case for "copyleft", or "free culture" (site requires registration). Or as they have it:

working together to counter the growing prevalence of the 'copy left/free culture' pontificators in the public discourse about creators rights.

DigitalMusicNews identifies this as a reference to Laurence Lessig and the likes of Gerd Leonhard. C'mon, ASCAP, you shouldn't be fighting these guys, you need to consult with them! Unlike the P2P-abusing freetards who don't begin to understand copyright, Lessig and Leonhard are genuinely engaging with the concept, with what copyright means and what the point of it is. They are trying to find a way forward that benefits our civilisation in general... not the rights owners who want, understandably, to defend their holdings - but who do so at the expense of progress, innovation, all that gubbins.

House of Dumbass Lyrics: Le Disko by Shiny Toy Guns

2009-01-24T09:34:00.002+01:00

If what they say is true you're a boy and I'm a girl.

What, can you not work that one out on your own? Eejits.

P2P good for society, say the Dutch

2009-01-22T19:47:00.001+01:00

It's not too alarmist to say that with P2P filesharing, the cat is most definitely out of the bag, and if you want to put the genie back in that particular bottle, you'd better prepare to get your hands scratched. By the cat from the bag.

I'll start again. Strongarm legal tactics and political lobbying are the preferred strategies of the Record Companies, in which they seek to wind back the clock, and drive the kids back to legal online alternatives to filesharing - none of which are as easy, efficient, adaptable, or cheap as filesharing. Leaving the moral arguments aside, it seems incredibly unlikely that will ever happen.

From Digital Music News (registration may be required) comes a story about research in the Netherlands into the net benefits/drawbacks of filesharing. The Ministry of Economic Affairs' report (PDF here, in Dutch) noted that unpaid downloads outnumber paid by a 7.5:1, that file-sharing increases the rate of music sampling, and that the greater appetite generated by said sampling sometimes leads to further purchases.

So far so obvnovious.

As DMN points out, "file-swapping is mostly a free-for-all". Here's the interesting part, and it's one that I feel is quite possibly true, from my own purely subjective observation: the report argues that the wider effect on society is in fact positive, because the gains to consumers outweigh the losses sustained by the record companies.

I'm banging the "copyright must change" drum again. Either the rules stay the way they are, and we effectively inhibit creativity and innovation - not just artistic but technological innovation too. Or we find a simpler, cheaper way to recognise the value of copyrights.

Last week I discussed this point with a band manager, who worried that copyrights were being devalued. Well, as far as I can see, it's inevitable.

The barrier to entry, for creating artworks, gets lower every day; it used to be expensive to record and market an ablum, now it just takes a semi-decent laptop, and internet access. And ever greater numbers of the populace in developing countries are discovering the luxury of producing art. There are more people alive now than ever before. (Witness the effects of crowd-sourcing, not flawless but done right, incredibly powerful.)

And so ideas are now one of the cheapest commodities in the world.

Remember, the tradition of copyright in the West is not based on absolute moral values, but on the economic landscape of the time in which those laws were drafted. Industrial "piracy" is a greater problem in Asia, at least as far as Western copyright-owning companies are concerned, because their understanding of copyright is based on wholly different traditions.

Ideas are useful, powerful, beautiful things. But there is no absolute value - they can be exchanged for free, and it's that free exchange that gave us civilisation in the first place.

This is not by way of saying all duplicated art should be free (though maybe that *is* something to mull over). Rather that the economical and technological landscape has changed so entirely, that defending the old order is more destructive than rejigging it from the ground up.

How about 14 years for the life of copyright? Whaddayareckon? What else should we do?

The Saturdays - Chasing Lights (Fascination, 2008)

2009-01-21T20:15:00.001+01:00

Adjusting their make-up and playing with their hair in anticipation of earning a "new Girls Aloud" tag, are The Saturdays.

I likes me some pop. Shiny, non-nonsense tunes buffed up by diligent, cynical collaboration until they reach such a level of virulence that the world has no choice but to lay down its ears in surrender.

Productions that thieve and steal from the cool kids in order to bring their cool but obscure little tricks, gizmos, and whistles to an ever-expanding audience. And well-drilled, soulless young professionals singing and dancing with a level of unison usually only achieved by fascist governments.

But where pop gets interesting is when people push the formula a bit - people like Xenomania, the geniuses (genii?) behind the Aloud's greatest work. Despite the reality show background, GA worked because Xenomania's productions are so damn audacious: Biology, which saves its chorus for 3/4 of the way through; Sound of the Underground's appropriation of none-less-fashionable surfabilly guitar; or the delicious electro-stomp of The Show.

So, where were we? The Saturdays? Nah, they're cute enough, they've got the same cheap wannabe-WAG style as the Girls Aloud (would love to claim I can rise above these considerations, but why deny it?). But they don't have the songs.

If This Is Love is the one with the Yazoo sample, which instantly elevates it above its peers - Vince Clarke, he the man. Did think there was another one that was almost alright, but now I can't find it. (I think a couple of the dancefloor numbers are semi-decent, but remember I cut pop groups a fair bit of slack.)

Because this is almost entirely cookie-cutter ablum filler, the ballads, the desperate attempts at "urban" numbers... the title track, from where I'm sitting, is an insidious rewrite of the Dawson's Creek theme. I must stress I'm no expert on that score.

Then there's Issues, which instantly takes the biscuit, due to its godawful lyric:
Can't decide if I should stab you or kiss you...
Me and my heart we got issues.
Nick Cave, just maybe, just might make that work. Sung by five stage school alumni it sounds about as threatening as an angry starfish.

One Light out of a possible five:

Amazon mp3 buylink.

My Manic and I

2009-01-21T09:21:00.001+01:00

Well, we're a couple weeks into '09 now, Obama has ascended to the American presidency to the accompaniment of fanfares and the world's collective sigh of relief. Really, what was with that last guy?

The crazed rush of unbridled optimism that led to this noo yeer's post has not been forgotten. Items from the resolution list are being implemented, but at a civilised pace. Screw that, I need to get a move on and find a yoga class, then the other resolutions are lined up like dominos ready to fall like a house of cards, to paraphrase Brannigan.

But yes, looking back on the first heady couple of weeks of the year, it feels like nothing so much as a manic episode. And it were brilliant.
*SHOVES HANDS IN POCKETS, STARES AT GROUND, KICKS IDLY AT A STONE ON THE FLOOR*

Admittedly I was spouting way too much feelgood nonsense - there's no need to sound like a self-help book, jeez naw - but it's only maintaining that freakishly positive outlook that ANY of my long overdue bobbins will ever get did.

Eleventy Secrets of Highly Effective Manic Episodes, by Swami BA Wilmington, BSd, PhC, will be on the bookshelves next week.

Noodlanding! Paradiso, Thursday 15th January

2009-01-20T14:10:00.002+01:00

Noodlanding! or "Emergency Landing!" last week was a blinder. A regular night at Paradiso, a smorgasbord of interesting acts, bumping into new friends (hello @kittynel), and as always, too much beer.

If you're in Amsterdam, keep a close eye on the Noodlanding! line-ups. If there's one act you want to see, you're bound to discover a few new good names throughout the night. Tearing up the Bovenzaal earlier on were the ska-styled alt.pop collective Still Flyin':

Nerdpop ranking, all right. Looking like a cross between Hot Chip and I'm From Barcelona, their eleven-strong crew spilled over the stage, half of them singing at any one time, all of them dancing (bar the drummer, obvnov.) with frenetic abandon.

We were half-convinced they would have another couple of guitarists playing in the corridor behind the stage, it was difficult to tell behind the clouds emanating from an overenthusiastic smoke machine. They had a xylophone AND a glockenspiel, fer crissakes (coulda been two xylophones, it was difficult to tell past all the indie grooving). A lotta fun, well worth catching 'em live - they've just signed to Moshi Moshi for the UK.

Later in the Bovenzaal - before they turned it into a smoking room - James Yuill:

We were here for James' set, and boy am I glad I've finally seen him live. Excellent stuff. From behind a modest bank of electronics, he delivers his sweetly melancholic songs, picking warm folky goodness from a battered acoustic guitar. But when he reaches for the filters, faders, and analogue synths, a huge shuddering juggernaut is unleashed, equal parts thumping and glitchy. Deliciously chunky breakbeats prowl around squealing acid melodies.

This clever mix of styles draws a growing, appreciative crowd, which in turn draws some funny between-song banter from the singer. Yuill's low-key demeanour might clue you in to his folk leanings, but when kickin' out the electro jams he rocks with an inward intensity behind his array of gadgets.

The Filthy Dukes:

To the main room for the Filthy Dukes, but after running around trying to find a few friends I missed all but the end of their set. Decent electro-rock in the mould of The Presets, say.

After JY, my other priority was Buraka Som Sistema, and they didn't disappoint. An hour of partytastic jump-up rhythms, like a soca version of Basement Jaxx, mebbe, or a more dancified Bonde do Rolê. We bopped right through to the end of their set, there being few moments where the group took their foot off the gas. Impressive.

Sites for:
James Yuill, and again at MySpace
Buraka Som Sistema's MySpace