aus-mosis: May 2006

- Berowra

If you hop on a train to Newcastle but hop off 30 min into your jorney at Berowra station you'll fnd yourself surrounded by lush New South Wales national parkland.

Anna came along too and we walked along the lake for a few hours. There was an amazing view from the shore and a crab-infested sandbank, a rustbuck3et that hid a lot of spiders and a neverending lake-side path.

- Kairingai

- Stumped

- My remix for Quentin

Save filed

History: Quentin put this message up on a forum so i had a bash... literally.

"Allrighty then.

I had an idea earlier tonight, and cobbled something together really quick for this purpose.

Seeing as I can't Photoshop for shite, I thought we should have some sort of Audio fun along the lines of Photoshop competitions going on elsewhere on this site.

Idea's just as simple, I'm going to offer an audio track for re-mixing/mashing/whatever you like here, and you can post your results here too and give us a feel for what your chops are like.

I've put together a groove with a couple of different parts, in sections, so you should be able to isolate drums, bass, etc. Your challenge, should you choose to play, is to take this and mash it whatever way you see fit, and let us hear the results.

Arrangement info for those who care is as follows, key/pitch Eminor (9th) and tempo set at 130bpm. File to download is aiff which may confuse some PC heads but go figure. 1 bar silence intro. Drag and drop!

You can find the tune here:
http://www.army-of-id.com/downloads/CImix.aiff
Play Safe."

- Spazzed sounds

From the "Now and Then" improv session some sydney sunday

and

From Hotel Koka Kinabla trying out new camera and Niall producing some mean tunage. Check the strange video-syncing totally by accidentally.

- Music city

Here's a couple of ads that i spotted in The Sydney Morning Herald. I better get onto my agent about the first one and as regards the second one, i guess it's not a "shit business" after all!!!!!!
(League of Gentlemen reference there, folks)

Luke Viberts acid electronic madness is coming up in a few weeks for Sydney's acclaimed Frigid venue's last ever gig. At last i can get my gig fix. It's on in Newtown, which is tres funky, and where i got a dubious massage off someone i though was just being plain charming a few eeks ago. It was 7pm in a busy bar and a cute chick came up to me was all chatty and proceeded to work her fingers into my shoulder. Cost a 5er! At least in Japan they hang around train stations and look like they're going to try and fleece you. That night we looked for some decent electronic music but Syndey seems to be a few years behind on that front so we settled for some Fibbers type heavyness with the local goths/rockers. Twas a nice nostalgic buzz all the samed and we got failry blasted on absynthe.

http://www.snarl.org/frigid/
.... oh and Mark Pritchard plays free on sunday.......and they're giving away matmos stuff too. (eric - go figure!)

Niall keeps wearing his "Trojan Records" t-shirt out which more than one folks has taken for the condom brand. Nice!

For the train-spotters out there "Boards of Canada" are releasing new EP "Trans Canada Highway" and so I dedicate these few shots of a banal sydney train station to them as the colour schemes exactly the same. It also sort of turned into a butterfly effect which i think is rather nice too. See here.

A few Sundays ago i went to my second Sydney avante garde/weirdo night a-la Dublin's Lazybird gigs at International Bar. This one was in an artists studio space which was a slight improvement on the first gig i met Aphex fan, Ryan, at on our first evening as sydney central residents. That place was a factor 10 squat but a 100% enjoyable gig with about 4 acts, electronics, droney guitars, disassembling drum kits and plenty of noise. Of course we met Ryan there who has since driven us up to the blue mountains and generally been an alround nice Adelaidian who knows his music. This time I had my camera and took plenty of snaps and alittle movie of some out-there guitar improv from a Tazzy involving all sorts of toys... childrens and adults and some darkly comic radio crackle involving the at -the-time stranded miners of the Beaconsfield distaster which was headlining all week. My kind of sick puppy.

Nialls been to a few more gigs than me and saw some The Necks action last week with Rob and by all accounts it was triffic. The Necks are a Jazzy/Droney 3-peice who appeared on SBS's experimental music documentary a few weeks ago and were damn bloody good. They reminded me of Steve Reich only less orchestral - live ambient music created on Bass, drums and piano.

In my rivetting new job i get the chance to listen to the radio all day practically as i work and after searching through the nightmare christian rock channels....which have the added horror of being Australian christian rock channels, i found "triple J" which has excellent music, no ads and intelligent presenters. They play indie,lo-fi and elecronica in the mornings and breaks and drum and bass in the afternoon but sadly haven't progressed onto the heavier side of electronica. Still they've been showcasing Robert Moog stuff all week as it is his brithday despite being dead so it's great to hear.

There was aslo the Surry Hills festival last weekend. It had plenty of music on offer - drum and bass dj'd, that awful australian house music and some live acts ranging from reggae to experimental. The weather was a bit off so i didn't really stay too long to be honest - met some nice hungarian and austrian folks, freinds of Anna-Maria, from the dojo, who is keen on some dancing at some point - and i am so game for that!

What else music wise? I'm working on Quentins remix project and should have something for him soon and will find some suitable images to lash it into video format for the aul blog.

- Travelogue pt 1

When I leave Yurong St, I climb the slopey hill passed the Christian Youth church opposite the recently burned out 2-storey. I'm soon facing Hyde park which see's flocks of gothkids every weekend and other dark fauna at nighttime - fruitbats and possums and the odd giant rat. If I take a right turn I pass by the Natural History Museum which has the largest privately owned precious gem collection in the world. One of my housemates, Brian has the smallest - he did a tour of an opal mine last summer and found a glittery spec. They let him keep it but it remains unpolished lest it dissolves.

Passing by the skate board plaza, which sits on top of a below-ground swimming pool, you soon reach the Sydney hospital which looks nicely colonial and is parked in front of the Domain - a large park stretching from Kings- Cross to the Opera house. I cut through the hospital into the domain to reach the National Gallery and it's free Wednesday films. Today it's Gus Van Sant's "Last Days" - film loosely based on Kurt Cobains last few days. It's pretty damn weird alright but nowhere near as lingering as "Gerry" which i saw on DVD a while ago. In both films there's lots of walking through closed in landscapes, which is fairly familiar to me now.

The gallery has been my destination a few times while in Sydney because it has this free cinema and 4 floors of contempory and not-so art so there's plenty to take in. It's also near the botanic gardens and it's giant spiders, lazy bats and greedy cockotoos. On a nice afternoon folks are either jogging or wearing suits on their work lunch break. Also nearby is the Crime and punishment museum, well worth a visit if only just to see the 3 sildeshow's depicting life in the early 20th century. The voiceover has a dark emotiveness to it that matches the early Sydney cityscape. One set of slides showed past convicts and gangsters, pimps and prostututes, all posing amazingly proud for the police camera, having probabbly never had their picture taken before.

Walking along the outer rim of the gardens and through the end of the domain brings you to the opera house which Clive James said looked like an old typewriter stuffed with oysters, which it sort of does. Behind that then is the harbour bridge which connect North and South Sydney. I wanted to walk across it so i went through Circular Quay and it's tourist throngs and negotiated my way through the hilly The Rocks area with its cafes and resteraunts. After a few flat-whites - delcious antipidion creamy coffee i set off across the bridge. The seaward side is form predestrians and the bay side is for bicycles and rollerbladers, all with trains and cars in between of course. It's a nice walk but a better cycle - being about a mile long it felt. I seemed to have timed my excursion with the passing underneath of the biggest container vessel which decided to annouce that it was leaving the bay with a equally massive foghorn roar that lifted everyone that was on the bridge about a foot. It was facinating then to see the ship glide by the opera house and dwarf it and to watch all the yaughts and ferrries avoid it's gargantuan wake.
If you wanted you could end your walk over harbour bridge with a trip down to the colourfull Lunar Park amusement strip but it really isn't worth the screaming local kiddies. Instead i cycled back over the bridge with dodgey breaks, beside a silver train depositing it's batch of salary workers southward and went for another flat-white before heading through the city back to Darlinghurst.