syntaxfree

Pop My Cherry (13 June, 2008, Hacienda)

I know I should've updated earlier about the popping of my DJ cherry last weekend, but somehow it really took a lot out of me, and in the days afterwards I just needed a break from having to concentrate so hard on music! (This is where Super Mario Galaxy, my apparently untiring Rome addiction, and midweek karaoke stepped in, hence blog silence.)

Anyway, it went better and worse than I'd hoped. Let's do "worse" first - my equipment fears turned out well-founded, because I found myself really struggling to beat-match on the CDJs at the venue, and the cross-fader didn't work. This basically means that I wasn't able to transition smoothly between tracks by adjusting the beat of the incoming track to match the beat of the outgoing track, and I couldn't scratch. I'd been prepared for this so I just did chop-mixing (abrupt but well-timed transitions) instead. It wasn't too disappointing, really, because even if I wasn't able to do the transitions I planned this time, all the work I put into thinking about them was still a very worthwhile exercise, and it leaves me with a useful set "template" I can still work with as I get better at this, and hopefully pull off properly in future.

The "better" is that I got some nice comments from people who were neither my friends nor married to me, I got a great opportunity to give this a first try in a public but very forgiving setting, and I even got 4 free drinks from the bar and a little cash! I'm really grateful to Cherry for giving me this chance, and I'm hoping that if/when I get a second shot, I'll have progressed sufficiently to be able to show that I've left my smoothie criminal days far behind.

Here's the tracklist, for anyone who's interested. It's not intended to fill a dancefloor, because Hacienda at 11 pm isn't quite that sort of a setting. When I was coming up with it, I was thinking about how we used to sit in Cargo waiting for Xen night's main acts to start, drinking and gorging ourselves on heavenly hot sloppy ketchup-and-mayo fries, and how although I was mostly engaged in the conversation and it was a little too early for dancing, the music being played was always good enough to steal some of my attention away. It's a rather modest level to aim for in a DJ tracklist, maybe, but it seemed appropriate for the context and my skill level. I'll save dancefloor bangers for when I can actually beat-match without screwing up!

1. Apparat - Holdon
2. Brian Eno & David Byrne - Regiment
3. Talib Kweli - Listen
4. TTC - Leguman
5. One Self - Trying To Speak
6. The Kleptones - Jazz
7. Clipse - Chinese New Year
8. Ice Cube - What They Hittin' Foe
9. RJD2 - F.H.H.
10. Nine - Lyin' King
11. Marco Polo feat. Kardinal Offishall - War
12. Spank Rock - Coke And Wet
13. Gangstagrass - Going Down
14. Notorious B.I.G. (Ratatat remix) - Party And Bullshit
15. Muddy Waters - Tom Cat
16. DJ Kentaro - Heard Yer Bird Moved In
17. Sway - Hype Boys
18. Prince - Gett Off

Maybe I Should Call Myself "DJ Smoothie Criminal"

People have been asking how the DJ classes are going, so I thought I should update everyone here. I'm six lessons in, with two left before I finish the Basic/Intermediate course. I'm still not very good with all the technical terminology of DJing but I think so far I've learnt beat-matching, mixing in and mixing out, scratching, drumming, fader tricks, and some basic beat-juggling.

What's been the most interesting about the lessons is how I've had to think about music in new ways that are quite different from my previous classical-musician or avid-music-consumer frames of reference. My classical training means Koflow didn't have to teach me how to count bars, and it's probably given me a good ear for timing and complicated rhythms. However, grade 8 qualifications in violin and piano still ain't worth shit when I'm doing the frantic mental juggle of counting bars in one song's chorus while beat-matching the next song and deciding when and how to mix it in, or trying to coordinate my scratching hand with my fader hand. I still have frustrating muppety days when I'm like "I used to play modern classical music with multiple changing time signatures in an orchestra, but I can't fucking figure out whether this song's 4 beats are faster than that song's 4 beats???!!" Such muppetry is best illustrated by the following exchange during one of my early lessons:

Me, trying out something Koflow just taught me: Why does my scratching sound so shit?
Koflow, patiently: Because you didn't switch the turntable on.

As a consumer of music, I've always been looking for songs which are well put together as a whole, where all the song's elements work to take you on that song's journey from beginning to end. But to listen the way a turntablist does is to never dismiss a song just because it doesn't appeal to you in its entirety, but instead to be constantly on the look out for elements you can isolate from that song and use creatively somewhere else. Any clubber and mixtape consumer already knows this, of course, but passively appreciating someone else's creativity is totally different from having to actively engage with the music on your own.

Which brings me neatly on to the news that, as new as I am to this type of listening, and as dodgy as my newly-acquired DJ "skills" may be, my friend Cherry recently took advantage of my drunken high at a good drum'n'bass night, and persuaded me to take a slot in her regular all-girl amateur DJ night, Pop My Cherry. The event's this Friday night at Hacienda (full details here), and my slot's from 11 to 12.

I'm a bit bashful about encouraging people to come, because I'm not actually going to be doing much of what I've learnt in my classes. I could give a long-winded explanation of why I'll essentially be doing my set on equipment I'm totally unfamiliar with and how things could go terribly wrong as a result, but I decided an easier way would be to just show you my phat home setup:

Yeah, so basically I have zero equipment to practice on at home. I've been meaning to get some, but it'll be the most expensive purchase I've ever made in my life, so I've been dragging my feet. Anyway, I've decided that for my first attempt at public DJing I'll just focus on not being too nervous and doing the best transitions I can between tracks, even if I don't manage to beat-match or scratch. So do come if you'd like to - I'd love the support - but if you do, just be aware that you'll be listening to a DJ whose only mixer is mostly used for smoothies.

Ghetto Rocket (Or, I'm Out For Cress-idents To Represent Me)

Sorry about the food-heaviness of some of these recent posts - work and learning Wordpress have been kicking my ass, so it feels easier to slap on a picture of a salad here than write thoughtfully about my initial impressions of Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop - though when looking up the Amazon link to include in this post, I conveniently found that this review captures them quite well.

We made this Tamasin Day-Lewis recipe for pear and blue cheese salad because we happened to have most of the ingredients for it.

We've adopted watercress as our poor-man's-rocket, since it's a fraction of the price of rocket but still has the peppery kick. Cheese is very pricy here so we try not to go mad with it, but Alec saw the Cashel blue cheese in Jones the Grocer a few weeks back when we made our first visit to Dempsey Road in about two years, and couldn't resist. YUPPIE. If you try this, you should note that the sesame seeds make the whole dish, so count them as essential. It's not the best food photo, but I liked the texture of the seeds and watercress against the pear glistening with olive oil, dribbles of balsamic vinegar and its own juice.

Last night, I made Martha Stewart curried apple and potato soup, which was delicious though not particularly photogenic. It went really well with a simple avocado and watercress salad, and 2 slices of kneadyguy bread.

And now, just to keep things here slightly more street than ending a post with Martha Stewart, here's an excerpt from Can't Stop Won't Stop. It's not perfect but I found it quite evocative, and more successful than some of Chang's other ambitious attempts to set context and mood:

It was 1977.

Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin's ambush and singing: "Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why." Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism's crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero.

In the Bronx, Herc's time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements - the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward - a loop of history, history as loop - calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

Is A Pity

Aw, hell naw. If I'd only known about Lambchop's wonderful cover of Sisters Of Mercy's This Corrosion before our wedding, it would totally have gone on the playlist. Don't get me wrong, I loved ending the night dancing to Nina Simone with Alec, but words like "Gimme the ring, kissed and toll'd" would've been a fun counterpoint to soppy stuff like "I bless the day I found you", even as wonderfully true as the latter may be. Future brides-to-be, don't pass up the opportunity I missed!

(Based on what I wrote a while back about what I like and don't like in cover versions, this song goes straight into the Complete Re-Imagining, OMG Awesome! category. Another direct entry is Grizzly Bear's cover of He Hit Me It Felt Like A Kiss.)

(Endearing extra: The This Corrosion cover can be found on the bonus disc for Lambchop's album Is A Woman. The bonus disc is called Is A Bonus.)

I Put My Thing Down Flip It And Reverse It

Apart from the awesome Velbon travel tripod, Alec also gave me private DJ lessons with DJ Koflow for Christmas. (We aren’t normally this lavish, but for our first Christmas as husband and wife we decided to spoil each other a bit. Also we hadn't given each other any birthday presents that year.)

It’s taken me a while to find time for the lessons but they’re finally set up, and I meet Koflow for my first private lesson this Saturday afternoon. Am a bit nervous, and acutely aware that my inability to keep up with new music over the last few years has hit my hip-hop listening especially hard.

Still, I’m very excited - despite years of enjoying and clubbing to great dance music, I’ve remained largely ignorant about the mechanics of DJing and now I finally get the chance to learn me some skillz! You know, like when Ice says “Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it”? Soon that could be me, baby.

Wearable Wankery

A curmudgeonly post about the dull Mosaic Music Festival lineup for 2008 is forthcoming, so I thought I would pave the way for it by showcasing a few music tees I found funny recently.

Diesel Sweeties' Elitism Diagram really skewers it. Threadless' Music Snob shirt sold out in every size within days of its release, unsurprisingly, but girls can still enjoy some sale-price snobbery with I Listen To Bands That Don't Even Exist Yet.

[Note: If you happen to buy the last tee through the above link, I get a little credit in my store account. It would make me very happy, but it's up to you. :) ]

Sounds Of Tweedness

Metafilter's discussion of the Oink shutdown was going quite predictably until Pastabagel went delightfully classic-rock curmudgeon crazy. An excerpt:

Well, la-dee-da, I beg of thee a thousand pardons. I guess The Melancolics performing Ennui No. 4 at the fucking Knitting Factory on a Monday night is the ne plus ultra of music. The wave of the future is shoe-gaze or shoecore or whatever the fuck you call it. Poor baby has too much anxiety on stage to look at the audience, so he gazes at his shoes. Yeah, that's so much better to watch than jumping off the monitors while playing your Strat with your teeth and then setting it on fire.

You know what your music sounds like? It sounds like tweed.

Dandy tweed music. That's probably a band you like. The Dandy Tweeds. From Leeds.

A flaming double neck guitar salute to you, Mr/Ms Pastabagel! And just for that brilliant snark about Broken Social Scene (not excerpted, read the whole rant to get it in context), you can have the soul of my firstborn.

Clan Of The Nick Cave Barenaked Ladies

This Coudal Partners contest on book/band mashups (via Daryl) is fun! Here are just a few of the entries that took my fancy:

• Charlie and the C&C Music Factory


• Chromeo and Juliet


• Qur'an Duran


• Courtney Love in the Time of Cholera


• Bridge over the River Jamiroquai


• The Odyssey and Cake


• Pop Will Eat Shoots And Leaves
• The Sun Also RZA (probably my favourite)

The contest's over already, but as usual with these sort of things I couldn't resist coming up with some of my own anyway.

Children's books:

• The BFG-Unit


• Harriet the Spinal Tap


• The Little Bonnie Prince Billy


• The Curious Incident of the Snoop Dogg in the Three Dog Night
(double mashup!)

• Smokey Robinson Crusoe


• Alec Empire Of The Sun (okay objectively this one isn't great but I'm sure you understand why it amuses me)

Penguin Classics:

• Of Mice Parade And Men


• East 17 Of Eden


• Northanger ABBA


• To The Lighthouse Family


• The Autumn Of the Patrick Wolf


• Mason And Dixie Chicks


• Pnine Inch Nails


• The Chemical Brothers Karamazov


• Donna Summer Quixote


• Tess of the D'urbervillage People

Others:

• The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay Aiken


• Kafka On The Beach Boys


• We Need To Talk Talk About Kevin


• If On A Winter's Night A Blues Traveller


• Anil's Ghostface Killah


• New Thom Yorke Trilogy


• True History of the Kelly Gang Starr


• Last Exit To Crooklyn Dodgers
• Fear and Loathing in Las Ketchup

So awful that I just couldn't leave them out:

• W-iliad Grant Conspiracy


• The Anticon-Tiki Expedition (yes, I know, record label)


• The Bonjovifire of the Vanities


• The Alcutchemist

Let's hear yours!

Calypso Against Criminals

Tee hee. I suppose the UK powers that be can't be expected to run the names of all new agencies through the "unintentionally amusing" filter, but Soca (the new Serious and Organised Crime Agency) is delightful. Fighting crime...WITH RIDDIM!

The Guardian article where I read about it makes me giggle a bit, especially when you take some of the sentences out of context. "Sir Stephen admitted that the formation of Soca had been 'quite a bumpy time'."

I Know That You Can Love Me When There's No One Left To Blame

I was in the bus this morning, listening to M83's Before The Dawn Heals Us for the first time in over a year, and all of a sudden I got it in my head that A Guitar And A Heart is rather like the ending half of November Rain.

Is this just a desperate abstraction thrown up by a mind that wants to be anywhere else than Monday morning, or do you think I actually have a point? This is driving me mad, I've listened to the M83 song 3 times at work already but it'll be more than 12 hours before I can get home and dig out my old GNR best-of mixtape (which is TEH AWESOME by the way, no one better be hatin'), and in the meantime I can't decide for sure.

A List Of Lists I Did And Didn't Do And Will Hopefully Do

Last year I attempted year-end lists for the first time, with only partial success.

I managed Top 5 Singles Of Shamelessness, 9 Songs To Thank MP3 Blogs For, and my top 5 films, but my Six Songs I Really Liked In 2004 But Which Weren't On Albums In My Albums List (Forthcoming, Seriously!) For Said Year And Which I Haven't Already Written About list only appeared in May (no, I did NOT spend all those months just typing out that title) and although I wrote a substantial amount of my Top 10 Albums list I never finished it.

This year things are looking tough. I could perhaps manage the Singles Of Shamelessness, but I'm really hard-pressed to pick anything worthy of inhabiting the same list as Incomplete. Mp3 blogs tend to get sidelined by having to spend hours on an office computer. And lastly, new releases probably made up only about 40% of the music I was listening to, sometimes from lack of access and other times from getting stuck in, say, Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball and not leaving for weeks.

Well, this is what I'm going to try this time: I'm going to start from the albums list, which I left till the end last year because it was the hardest and therefore remained IN-COM-PLEEEEETE...and frankly, I don't know if I can even manage anything else, so we'll leave it at that!

So there's lots of music geekery coming up, folks. I bet you never thought of a time you'd miss a photo of a cock and balls sculpted in facial moisturizer, but there you go.

Random Rules Rules

Oh! Oh! Stylus's latest Perfect Moments In Pop instalment features a song I adore - Random Rules, by the Silver Jews - and is absolutely spot-on about what makes the song and the band so quietly stupendous.

In fact, the almost complete congruence between the sentiments of the article and my three-year-old post about the same song, is actually kinda freaky. Checkit.

Breezeblock Notes (Cannibal Ox/Medaphoar)

Reasons not to be disappointed when one tunes into this week's Breezeblock expecting DJ/Rupture, doesn't get him after all, and must instead listen to what the good people at Radio One have come up with instead:

• The Cannibal Ox reunion gig
• Medaphoar live in session
• Cursor Miner - Carnivore, and ScanOne - Yes Yes, 2 tracks from The Four Guardians EP (Combat Records), which basically sounds like it'll be shit-hot.
• Dijf Sanders - Neglected Pleasures

How many ways do I love the BBC? How many ways do you?

Manual For The People

At Stylus, J. Edward Keyes does an interesting Playing God With REM's Up. Unfortunately, I sold this album in my last CD purge and am therefore unable to experiment with his recommendations, but the article still makes for good reading and I love how it describes my favourite song on that album, At My Most Beautiful (which it repositions from track 5 to second last):

Coming near the end of the record, it sounds like salvation, the final beautiful destination we�ve been struggling towards for the last nine songs. It felt chintzy at the center of the record, a piece of rock candy on a plastic ring, but as a conclusion it�s a solid diamond, three-and-a-half straight minutes of melody as a reward for struggling around the record�s hundreds of tight corners. Stipe sang the word �smile� and Mills went �doot-doot-doot� and so everybody within throwing distance hollered �Beach Boys!�, and God only knows how many reviewers followed suit. It�s just as much Gary Wilson as Brian, though, a Botticelli done up in Day-Glo Paint. More, though: it captures that beautiful, holy, serene stillness that comes when you watch the person you love sleep. �I count your eyelashes, secretly��who does that? A better question: Who doesn�t?

Illmatic In The Morning

This morning I seek refuge in beats and verse and the pretence that I'm somewhere else. I stagger from my house (straight out the fuckin' dungeons of rap), sprint for the bus (I ran like a cheetah with thoughts of an assassin), sit slumped on my seat (be havin dreams that I'm a gangster - drinkin Moets, holdin Tecs) as I lurch and jerk towards work.

I'm not here. I'm on New York streets, sewin' up the blocks to sell rocks, winnin' gunfights with mega cops.

I'm not living with the consequences of a decision I made when I was 18, working the next 6 years for pay dwarfed by that of my peers. I'm livin' like Capone, with drug scripts sewn, or the legal luxury life, rings flooded with stones, homes.

Escapism is easy on four hours' sleep. I sit in my bus seat, dead to the world but alive inside. Inhale deep like the words of my breath: I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death.

Then New York State Of Mind finishes, and the next song starts. It features the rousing refrain: Life's a bitch and then you die.

Songs To Get Your Freak On To

I particularly like reason 7 of the ILM thread Ten Reasons Why Silk's "Freak Me" Is 100000x Better Than "Sexual Healing":

General tone of inclusiveness. Though Silk are perhaps being a little self-centered with the title, they also promise to lick you up and down (and to be sensitive to your limits while doing so), also offering to make you real hot and to do all of the things you want them to do. Marvin, on the other hand, isn't thinking about anyone's needs besides Marvin's. "I need some loving," "I know you'll be there to relieve me," "you're my medicine," "it's good for me and it's good to me"--Marvin requires his sexual healing, dammit, and fuck if he's going to let your wants and desires get in the way of that.

Later in the thread, someone says that as sex songs go, Shai's Comforter would KO either of the 2 songs under consideration - this is bollocks, unless you think "When you are in pain I'm in pain" and "He don't know how sensitive you are" are meant to be kinky lyrics.

But perhaps I'm in no position to pass judgment on other people's sex song preferences, given that out of the two songs I find sexiest (off the top of my head), one includes the line "I drink on a daily basis" and the other is about a spiderman coming to have you for dinner tonight.

Beethoven At The Beeb

BBC Radio 3 is playing every single note of Ludwig van Beethoven during this week, and will also make all 9 of his symphonies available for download. I think this is pretty damn awesome, and the product of far greater vision (and okay, public funding) than that which motivates the Best Classical Hits In The World...Ever! vibe of Classic FM.

I'm hoping to use the site and whatever programmes I manage to listen to online to broaden my existing Beethoven knowledge beyond his symphonies, violin and piano works. Although I only revisit my classically-trained past occasionally, it always feels like time well spent once I do.