You Make Me Like Charity

A guy and a girl trade verses and half-meanings, some proclaimed, some whispered, all against a background of stripped-down synths and minimalist percussion. That is all. It lasts only 3 minutes 5 seconds. And I am completely addicted.

You can hear You Make Me Like Charity, the song that’s currently ruling my life, here (it’s track 11), as well as the rest of this rather lovable album by The Knife.

Edit: Shit. Looks like they’re no longer streaming the album. Sorry about that. I’ll just have to listen to it a couple of extra times for all of you.

Stealth Fighting

The RIAA Radar is an easy way of checking if any of the music you own, share or download is RIAA-released or not. And why do you want to know this? To quote the RIAA Radar site:

“That’s possibly a fairly long answer, but just the highlights of the RIAA’s practices involve price-fixing, blaming its poor financial state on unfounded digital piracy claims (and in turn, blaming and suing its own consumers), lobbying for changes that hinder technological innovation and change copyright laws, underpaying the artists it represents, invading personal privacy to enforce copyrights, and dismantling entire computer networks just because of their ability (of their users) to share copyrighted files.

In order to successfully and efficiently support who you like (or not support who you don’t like), you need to have information immediately available to know who is who. The RIAA Radar works in two ways: if you’re looking to stop buying RIAA releases, it will help tell you what albums to avoid (or purchase secondhand); if you are looking for new music or new alternatives, it works to promote non-RIAA releases by providing similar RIAA-free albums to almost any RIAA release, and RIAA-free popularity charts for several genres in order to showcase viable alternatives.”

Out of curiosity (okay, and extreme boredom), I checked some of the stuff on my iPod against the radar and was quite pleasantly surprised with the results.

Non-RIAA:
A Silver Mount Zion
Adem
Aereogramme
Amon Tobin
Animal Collective
Bedhead
Black Heart Procession
Boards Of Canada
Bonnie Prince Billy
Brother Ali
Calla
cLOUDDEAD
Coldcut
Decemberists
Devendra Banhart
Diplo
Dirty Three
Diverse
Dizzee Rascal
DJ Rupture
DM + Jemini
Edan
Elliot Smith
Explosions In The Sky
Fog
Four Tet
Fugazi
Interpol
Iron And Wine
Jacques Lu Cont
Jean Grae
Knifehandchop
Lambchop
Low (most albums OK except Long Division)
Magnetic Fields (most albums OK except i)
Manitoba
Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia
Michael Mayer
McLusky
Ming + FS
Mogwai
Múm
Neutral Milk Hotel
Pavement
Pedro The Lion
Prefuse 73
Polvo
RJD2
Silver Jews
Songs: Ohia
Soundmurderer
Summer Hymns
Telefon Tel Aviv
The Arcade Fire
The Books
The Czars
The Shins
The Unicorns
Third Eye Foundation
TV On The Radio
Ulrich Schnauss
Unwound
Wiley
Yo La Tengo

RIAA:
Brian Eno
David Holmes
Disco Inferno
DJ Spooky
Durutti Column
Hidden Cameras
Meat Puppets
My Bloody Valentine
Photek
Pixies
Sonic Youth
Talk Talk

Of course, it should be noted that there is a whole lot of RIAA music that would be on my iPod if I could be arsed to rip more of my CDs eg. Radiohead, Velvet Underground, Kanye West, Bob Dylan, Joy Division, Orbital etc. But in general, I think the main point that has become obvious from this exercise is that there is a lot of bloody excellent music around which won’t get you in trouble with the RIAA.

Having said this, I personally believe that if you like what you hear, you should buy the music. This is why I am continually broke.

Dancing To Autechre

I sometimes bob around my room a bit while listening to Autechre, but I never thought of them as a techno act anyone would really dance to until I saw this mindbending video of some Korean-American guy dancing to (what sounds like) their song Eutow.

What Kind Of Elitist Are You?

HASH(0x89b0860)
Your CD collection is almost as big as your ego,
and you can most likely play an instrument or
three. You’re a real hit at parties, but you’re
SO above karaoke.
What people love: You’re instant entertainment.
Unless you play the obo.
What people hate: Your tendency to sing louder than
the radio and compare everything to a freaking
song.

What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Spot-on about the relative sizes of my CD collection and my ego, spot-on about my instruments, but totally wrong about the rest. I don’t see myself as a big hit at parties or instant entertainment (I wish!), I never sing louder than the radio unless it’s playing Wuthering Heights or Manta Ray, and I am SO NOT above karaoke. Also, I’m far too self-absorbed to compare everything to a freaking song, I usually prefer to find a parallel experience in my own life to bore and annoy other people with.

My Pathetic Tribute To John Peel

I’m too wimpy to host mp3s myself here (bandwidth fears, plus that inconvenient future profession of mine), but I thought I’d mention some bands who I heard about through John Peel, and who (unlike the Shite Stripes) aren’t anywhere near famous enough yet.

  • The Crimea: Baby Boom is the song that got me hooked. Wonderful soaring guitar lines, thoroughly appealing melody, and the slightly hoarse wheedling tone of the lead singer endears me instead of irritating me the way Ben Gibbard’s does. Altogether it is rather like skinny-dipping in a lake of shooting stars on the happiest day of your childhood. You can listen to snippets of a couple of other songs here – try Bombay Sapphire Coma and Out Of Africa.
  • Knifehandchop: Mixes drum’n’bass with every sound known to man and then some. Completely manic, deliciously unpredictable, and generally as addictive as cocaine, complete with the tendency for nosebleeds. Already fairly well-known among people who keep up with the scene, but still not famous enough for me, so go check out his Peel Session, kindly made available for download at boomselection.
  • Murcof: I heard some tracks on the John Peel show, which then influenced me to buy a Leaf Label sampler, which in turn introduced me to Asa-Chang & Junray and some very strange dreams. Murcof isn’t for everyone, I’ll admit. I’d understand if people found him too cold and cerebral, but there’s something I rather like about the atmosphere he creates, like a room of shifting sands in an abandoned avant-garde funhouse. Try Memoria, off his excellent Martes album.
  • Magoo: I didn’t actually hear Magoo on the John Peel show, but the fact that he was a fan was the reason I decided to check out their gig at the Arts Cafe. I was completely floored, and have gone on to acquire all of their albums since then. No mp3 link here, I’m afraid, because there isn’t much about Magoo online and they’re almost impossible to locate on file-sharing networks because you tend to get a lot of Timbaland stuff instead. But if you pick up an album I’d recommend The Soateramic Sounds Of Magoo or Realist Week. Better still, see them live because they’re incredibly tight. Tour dates can be found at their official site.

Silence The Pianos And With Muffled Drum

John Peel has died suddenly of a massive heart attack. I didn’t listen to him as regularly as I did the Breezeblock, which I am now profoundly regretting. I wasn’t expecting him to die at 65. I was expecting him to be showcasing the latest developments in chainsaw folk techno well into his 90s.

The thing is, I don’t have to have listened to him 3 times a week to feel as if I’ve lost a hero. Perhaps I’m just generally in an overemotional frame of mind (see previous post), but for the first time in my life I’m listening to Teenage Kicks with tears in my eyes.

Michelle Gone To Heaven

Music For Robots (which I really must add to my sidebar, because it has given me more great songs in the past few weeks than some other mp3 blogs have in their lifetimes) alerted me to this trippy version of Monkey Gone To Heaven, done by The Artist Currently Known As Frank Black Francis.

I should probably be able to form an opinion on how this version compares to the original, but I’m just too busy smiling and burbling and swaying rhythmically back and forth with my head rolling around on my neck like Stevie Wonder to put together anything coherent.

I do miss the “Then GAAAAWWWD is seven!” screeches in the Pixies version though.

Herbal Viagra For The Clubber’s Soul

If you haven’t heard of Pojmasta yet, bow down and worship anyway, because he’s in my DJ pantheon and this is my blog. Not content with rocking my subwoofer with his mixes of Toxic (glitchtastic!) and Milkshake (disco!) and Lucky Star (as uncategorizable as the original!), his recent 30 minute Scummer Mix is masterful and creative and groovy as fuck.

AND HE’S PLAYING AT HERBAL ON 8 OCTOBER.

Meanwhile, over here Zouk is on some sort of “Most Boring Fabric DJs Ever” trip with James Lavelle and Lee Burridge, the Heineken Green Room Sessions are continuing straight and unerringly down the middle of the road with Thievery Corporation, and from what I’ve heard so far the big hip-hop DJ at Zouk Out this year is Jazzy Jeff, who is good but I’ve already seen him twice.

No one can deny that a decent stream of big-name DJs come to Singapore, and if time and money permit I’m perfectly happy to go see them. It’s just that I feel that where the sort of clubbing music that fascinates me is concerned, London is charging ahead and I’m stuck here doggedly trying to get enthused about the famous but bland, imagining Russ doing his “bored dance”. (Props to Andrew Chow though. Phuture is my little oasis of joy when he spins.)

So, has this been yet another rant about missing London? Mostly, but not totally. There are a few things that help me cope with not being in London, and one of them will soon be here. Normally I’d be gnashing my teeth about not being able to see Pojmasta at Herbal on 8 October, but given that I will be lying on Sibu beach with Alec on that day, I wouldn’t be anywhere else for the world.