aus-mosis

- End of Aus

2007-02-05T08:09:00.000-08:00

Well Niall's back soon and this blog must fizzle out...meanwhile heres a cute little video of ferrying in Sydney............................

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGIJUVpWc8c

Top Five of 2OO6

2006-12-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

Yes indeedy its that time of year again - to encapsulate the feelings, the vibes even, of the year 2006 in 5 tracks. At Antoin and Eileens, a few of us are getting together to reduce our 365 aural days to just a pentuplet of sonic favourites. We'll laugh and we'll cry. Eyebrows will be raised and fingers will insert themselves in ears. By the miracle of soulseek we're able to bring you Col and Nialls remote selection of songs from opposite sides of the global village square. Photo's and listings to be shown below.....

Antoin
When The Evening Sun Goes Down Half Man Half Biscuit
New Age Subhumans
Tommy Gun Angel Bardo Pond
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted Joan Osbourne & The Funk Brothers
Dance Music The Mountain Goats

Colin Coscoran
Not High Times New Viking
Shrinking_Moon_for_You_edit Wooden Shjips
dance, caiforrnia Wooden Shjips
GT Performers Home Blitz
Roadrunner Jonathan Richman

Eileen
Time of Your Life (Good Riddance) Green Day - video
Mr. Brightside The Killers
God’s Gonna Cut You Down Johnny Cash
Fake The Frames
Up Around The Bend Creedence Clearwater Revival

Niall
Salty Dog Cat Power
prelude in 303 major Ceephax
Blue yodel - number 8 Jimmie Rodgers
Mother Africa Marijata
I’m Hurtin Thee Headcoats

Colin Roche
? Alice Donut
Dinosaur Act Low
? Redneck Manifesto
? Kate Rusby
Work, Rest, Play, Die Subhumans - vinyl

Neil
Freight Train Elizabeth Cotton
T.B. Blues Leadbelly
Sail On Little Girl Leadbelly
Nobody’s Dirty Business Mississippi John Hurt
Reelin’ In The Years Steely Dan

Mel
? Calexico
? The Go Team
? ABAM
? Glenn Miller
? Glenn Miller

Alex
track 2 form the BBC’s Electric Proms Squarepusher - video
Orient Orange Squarepusher
uranus orbitron Keyfumbler
twisted jungle clip from John Peel Show DJ Bailey
Welcome to europe Squarepusher

Eric
This Year The Mountain Goats
Horns Version Mapstation
Mr Tough, Yo La Tengo
Night After Sidewalk, Kaki King
Glosoli, Sigur Ros

Niall issued a special tribute to James Brown F.I.P.;; nice one.

And in an unprecedented twist Eric and Antoin both independently had the same number one. Who'd have thunk it! (I forget what it was actually......yikes)

Photos's exist here.http://www.flickr.com/photos/flickrmook/sets/72157594449124339/

2006-10-30T05:13:00.000-08:00

)))))))))))) k e y f u m b l e r ((((((((((((---------- --

For the next fortnight I'll me sharing all the little
tracks i've been making the past few years with cheap and
nasty software. 2 a day.

http://www.4shared.com/dir/1128400/c94b21c1/sharing.html

The eleventh day has 4 tracks to annoy you. Ones about 14 minutes long! Noice!

A blow by blow:

James town01: Ah, me and my old flatate collaborated on this one. He did the beats and i did all the noise bits and gave it structure. Struc-ture.

Vere Wynn Jones: The name of a newsreader from the 80,s on RTE, Irelands national broadcaster. I always liked the name. What a guy! The track is sort of "autechre"ish i think but without the lasting impression.

Dats it. Robert Deniro in one of his funniest roles ever in one of his first films, either "greetings" or "hello mom" by Brian de Palma. I think the beats work well but the recording of the sample is shite.

Exsta: Weird little tune with a dark twist and nicely roughened beats. "Now, i'm very angry"

method: This tune has a version somewhere where i used a vocoder program to read the introduction to a book on how to commit suicide that my old flatmate got of the interweb. In the dialogue the voice lists methods of commiting suicide and i got it to repeat one method as a chorus, namely "by crashing airplanes". I finished this track on September 10th 2001. That werided me out in a big way a day later . This version is just the music. If you want to hear the freaky one, ask me.

naming it: I love the pear cussion in this track. Ha, i think i was using strummy guitar sampless before fourtet and board of canada, but i cant prove it and i didnt use them much!

mastro: My first ever dancefloor rave type track. You wanna hear this one in a trackter session - a program for djing mp3's - its mmmmmmmmmwicked.

(kew)mix: the letter that looks like an "O" with a diagonal line through it is broke on this keyboard so i spell "kew" instead as it sounds the same. This track is my homage to John Peel using samples provided by (kew) from the dojo. RIP

more to come!!!!

ceepha-x-mas 2006

2006-10-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

Warmup DJ: Dj Leem- stoned as fook, funny as a bastard.... played some mean electro, u2 for laughs, squarepushers "tundra 4" and generally talked shite over lots of records but in an endearing crowd_pleasing way. A right laugh.

Max Tundra- absolutely awesome live set from, the little chappy with the funk/soul groove and masterful keyboard skills with guitar too. Old and new songs, all of them playfull and FUNKY with gorgeous electro-beatmanship throughout. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Ceephax-tore it up with a "hello everything" heavy set that put that albums killer tracks in the rave context they were always meant to be in. In between it was classic acid-breakbeat wizardry from the 'phax with killer tracks like "prelude in 303 minor" (bangface style placards came out for that one) and the "A(cid)-team" theme track whacked out at full blast. The topper was a full acid-techno rendition of the "12 days of christmas" song .... "five gold rings" with phat-turkey synth lines taking over the words. The place went fuckin smental i tells ya. Not so much any_jenkison mc action as his live sets but enough to tickle me fancy. He was playing tapes too so i guess that included his new cassette releases;.... sounded well fucking wogan!

- know this

2006-07-25T02:48:00.000-07:00

Squarepushers got a new album out in Oct... "hello everything" so in celebration check out some vintage squarepusher from 1997, Tokyo.

- Surf Sup

2006-07-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

No I ain't been yet but here's a video of what could happen with some great music by Todashi who's got a blog now too and a link to it from over there - >.

- Coogee coo

2006-07-10T00:46:00.000-07:00

A walk from Coogee beach to Bondi with new housemate Sylvia, the Niallster, old Dublin neighbour Katherine of Melbourne who was in town for the day, Anna of Colombia and Korean Kisen!

- Japanese movie posters

2006-07-08T04:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=2806

I just think these are the funniest things ever on so many levels!!!

- A.L.X. 1138

2006-06-25T22:50:00.000-07:00

- Grande mochafrappacino and a fudge brownie, mate

2006-06-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

- Look!.. Vibert!!!!!!!

2006-06-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

Woah what an amazing night!!!! Just zactly what the doctor ordered. A night of pure quality electronica from one of the masters - mr Luke Vibert.

12 min, 25M Video montage..

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=CB2B37F64BA8BD4E

The gals had a bloody blast too and we boogied all night long - me donning my home-made pusher t-shirt!! Sabrina and Caro were the best company ever.. viva France!!

The venue was as good a place as you could ask for for a night like this - just the right size and capacity - Newtowns RSL club at the 10th anniversary Frigid rave. For some bizarre reason we had to become temp members for the night an dthey required ID off us with our home addresses on it. Yeh right... i pleeded "just offf the plane" syndrom and the real nice lady bouncer gave me a motherly pat on the face saying "now we won;t forget next time will we?". She was well cool.

All was happening upstairs and we found ourselves in a smoke-free tripped out club with a more than decent laser system and massive visual screens sort of weirdly overlapping in th emain room. The bar was never too crowded and the small secondary room had a killer bass system that suited the jungle/reggae-techno being played there. We hung around there till LV came on at 1145pm then got soem more Vodkas' and Orange and went to see the acid maistro do his thing.

Vibert played enough Squarepusher, Aphex, Ceephax and his own stuff to keep me going for ages. It's what he did with those tunes that was incrdeible too... here comes the nerdy bit: Early on he played here Aphex's "Alberta balsam" which was amazing to hear at a club. This slow groove part was peppered with plenty of lush vibert tracks and when "i love acid" was brought in the crowd was well and truly settled into the night. In his faster mode, about half way through, he played some Squarepusher "Selection 16" cuts - he ALWAYS does actually... every time i've seen him play. Then came soem Analogue Bubblebath tracks and a good few Wagonchrist ones too. I was hoping for soem of his jungle choons but i guess they wouldn';t have really fit in tom his set

The best was yet to come though when he slipped the last half hour into what i can only describe as full on acid-gabba. Yes, you heard me - acid gabba!!!!! It was't hard at all but light and fluffy and very spine-tingling but god-damn fast and relentless. The golden moment was when he mixed Ceephax's Rough Acid version of Prelude in 303 Major.mp3 available http://www.ceephax.co.uk/Music.htm with a cut-up version of Aphex's unreleased "complicated mathimatical equation" song that features in those circa '97 livesets. This was the freshest and lushest music i have heard in ages - a new sound from London - again!

The Frigid DJ's guys then came played a blinding closing set of gescom-type electro/techno and we partied some more. Luke walked by us and of course i shook the mans hand off him and regretted not having a minidisc of my own stuff (comin soon!) to wedge into his pocket!

The night was topped off by our taxi ride home with The Nicest Cab Driver Ever, a chap from Bali with a huge afro, and irish wife - he's been to the old sod 6 times, and photos of the cutest afro/irish kids you ever saw.

Pure fecking mexico.

- Eric's blog

2006-06-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

Very funny blog from Seattle resident and aero-engineer to the stars, Eric....

http://blogmeansblog.blogspot.com/

feck the world cup.... Roller Derbys where it's at!

Nice one... i had to do some washing after i read it.

- Boards of Australia

2006-06-09T00:13:00.000-07:00

To mark the release of the new Boards of Canada EP "Trans Canadian Highway" i'm doing this thing right here.....it also happens to show my temporary workplace in Sydney but who cares about that.

Excellent BoC info here http://fredd-e.narfum.org/boc/info/

(oh and i'n not "bored" with ozland at all in case you're wondering. Just being punny)

Ya see what i did there?!

- Berowra

2006-05-30T01:48:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

- Stumped

2006-05-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

- My remix for Quentin

2006-05-26T03:45:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-26T01:42:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-25T20:26:00.001-07:00

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

2006-05-14T23:55:00.000-07:00

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.

- Squareing up

2006-05-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

- Harbour postcard

2006-05-05T00:18:00.000-07:00

- 62 Yurong St

2006-05-04T21:47:00.000-07:00

brian n mayumi
laura, anna and mayumi
give it up...ned kelly
fridge magnetism

sabrina n jo
ray vaughn

george

silence of the lambs
slopey

nial and katrine

- Sydney on the move

2006-05-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

- Blue Mountains

2006-05-04T07:05:00.001-07:00

<- ryan - don't let him near a stapel gun

- Homemade video by me

2006-04-27T23:28:00.001-07:00

Prizes if you can name the film and your names not Niall.

- Scarey Bookshop

2006-04-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

I found this place in Newtown, Sydney..... lots of ancient secondhand books, with the tiniest semblance of any order! You may guess the music........

- Movies, moves and not-moving

2006-04-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

At Nialls blog..........check out le video reportage there..... and here soon!

http://pokermonatron.blogspot.com/

- Easter with Charley, Katey, Rob, Lisa and Muddy at Wye

2006-04-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

- Aquarius

2006-04-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

- Climbed up a mountain, came down a mountain

2006-04-10T22:12:00.000-07:00

Paul - thanks for the pain!

Everyone said it'd be a "doddle". I didn't know that that was the only word i'd be able to say when i did it though. After a bit of cooking on the beach the day before we sort of knew it's be a bit of a challenge to walk - never mind climb - some tiny slope in central Borneo. It was a 3 hour drive to the foot of the place.

From wikipedia: Some believe the name Kina-balu means "Chinese widow", from "China" and the Malay word "Balu", meaning "widow". An alternative derivation is from the Kadazan dusun phrase "Aki Nabalu" meeting "the revered place of the dead".

Ha ha! Good one!

Anyway we reached base-camp which itself was at 4900 ft and to which we went via astounding jungle scenery and winding roads. The driver seems to like hugging the absolute extremity of the s-bends and you could almost touch the canopy below. We stopped off for a dodgy sand-flavoured ice-pop on the way and there was a local mountain-person market going on selling all sorts of made-in china local wares.

Having reached base-camp we were introduced to our guide. I'll call him Yung Fella as i didn't catch his name and when i asked he showed me how well he could smile and nod. We thought we'd be put into a group of climbers but it seems Yung was our personal looker-afterer. "Many people have lost their way up there" we'd been told. Funny cos in the end the never-ending path was pretty obviously only going one way, a never-ending way as it turned out. It's true though that there had been a few deaths on the mountain and only the previous week some chap decided to go off without a guide, got lost in an early morning fog and was found frozen inches from the path the next afternoon. Stay with us Yung Fella!

The first few hundred steps were'nt too bad I suppose. After awhile your blisters sort of become one with the rubber/leather your wearing. You decide early on to take a water break every 100 steps but like every other aspect of the climb, this soon turns out to be a little too ambitious.
So you'd climb 10 steps, turn a corner and see another 50. You do them, turn the next bend and there'd be 2, then 10, then 40, then 10 then 100 then some rock, then a flat bit then a sign sayin "4km to go" then 50 more steps. It was a gruelling 5 hours of corners and steps. Not only this but climbing through a height of 10,800 ft leaves you a little breathless... and not just because the scenery is amazing............ were talking falling O2 coverage here.

I can see my house from here!

5 hours later, having been bypassed by scores of Japanese old-folks literally prancing up the mountain as if they do mt Fuji for morning stroll, we arrived at the pre-summit hostel Laban Rata hut at 3300 m. It's funny becasue by the time the thing came into view, after all thoses steps, I expected to feel like some soldier after clambering throuh the desert to see an oasis, or like that chappy in "Ice cold in Alex" when he reaches for the Carlsberg. Instead I was asbolutely uncaring of the closeness of a chance at lying down in a bed. I saw the hostel, with its' promise of a rest, some food and possibly a tank or 2 or pure oxygen but i really didn't care. I managed to drag myself the final few hundred years, over the biggest steps i'd encountered yet.

As a joke, the built some extra steps to the hostel just for me!

Improving my altitude

We registered at the hostel, thanked our guide who'd merely stayed 10 ft behind us all the way up just to make sure we didn't suddenly take a shine to some invisible trail on the way up. Found a bed-shaped thing and crawled in for a nap or 20. When I woke I heard the sounds of some kind of game going on and looked ou the window to see The Match At the Top of the World....a freindy happy-sac game bewteen guides and climbers...... all with an amazing sunset and a blanket of mist as a backdrop. It seemed to be all worth it...

Postscript:

Er ....we were supposed to get up at 2am at the hostel and be led up the rest of the sheer granite face to the ACTUAL summit to see the sun-rise over the tropics. That would have been a further 3 hours climb in zero-degree temperatures. So i called my doctor and he told me the risk wasn't worth it so i stayed in bed. You got a problem with that talk to the doc!!

Coming down was a LOT easier and i could only laugh my ass off at the poor feckers ascending the next day. Oh how I poited and laughed and told them how tough it was and they only had 1500 more steps to do!

I joke of course

- "At the Koka - Koka Kinabla"

2006-03-27T04:08:00.000-08:00

<- A tropical fish lodges itself in nialls snozz Even the trees go for a snorkel! ->

Lots of snorkelling, island hopping and sunburn. Like muppets we spent too much time watching the tropical fish, the spinny sea urchins, the colourfull coral and the star fish to pay attention to our exposed legs. We trekked through on eof the islands and found a ”secret” beach and chilled for a while. On the way back a we were joined by a colourful companion – a butterfly who seemed to follow us down the path. We joked that it was the island Westworld controllers sending their animatronic fauna to please the visitors and that they were probably right now arranging for more white sand to be spread on the artificial beach. In fact when we got back to the main beach area a team of locals was sweeping the sand of unwanted flotsam and jetsam - which was nice.

The town nite-life wasn’t really up to much as it was out of season but we did hang around the busy promenade for a few nites. We missed the Ireland/England rugby match due to a mix up in dates – JL again. On one night we found a bizare little band on keyboards and guitar with a dodgy lead female singer crooning to a handfull of night-trippers. Another night we went down to walk trough the bussling filipino market but got slightly put off hanging around by the large rats hanging around. Indstead we found a second story bar balcony and watched the 2 legged variety of nightlife scurry around below us. The next day we were to travel a few hours to climb some little hillock in the country side... easy peezy lemon squeezy!

A big fan of sunsets - >

- A bit of Japan.. in Chinatown ...in Malaysia!

2006-03-20T06:14:00.000-08:00

It was time to get in touch with James Lee, KL’s resident Budo teacher. I had emailed an English student of his Johnathon, about training while there, but he was out of town on business so he gave me James’ phonenumber. I rang many times, checked the website for other contact numbers, tried them and got nowhere... fast. I decided to head to Chinatown anyway, where I was told that there was a dojo, thinking that the martial winds should blow me in the right direction. There was no street address on the website but I figured I’d find some sign of Bujinkan .....somehow.

When we got there Chinatown was a bigger hawk-market than the golden triangle. It was big with all sorts of animals, alive and dead being cooked, chopped, roasted, boiled, fed, eaten on the streets. People ate beside sewers, outside shops and in every doorway you could see.
I found an international call center - i.e. some bloke with a phone in a little stall - and rang James again. Bingo, I got through and because of a bad line/accent/street-noise I got the phone guy to tell James I was opposite a pretty spectacular Indian temple and he said he’d be there in 10 mins.

I rejoined Niall on the street and found him chatting to a very colourfull chap indeed. He was a 60+ leathery skinned fellow who seemed to me to represent all I read about Malaysia. He was half Portugese, half Malaysian… a Christian with one eye firmly trained on the decades recent upsurge in Muslim control. He reckoned the Muslims were fine but it was the extreme ones, that he worried about. He said he expected tighter control in the coming years but also mentioned how they’d never really take full control like in Middle-Eastern states because the secular Chinese were too powerfull in the country. They were the backbone he said and that was fine with him. Checks and balances. He said he’s been all around the world and experienced many cultures. He concluded that the West, the Europeans had the best of it all because they were free to do what they wanted – he was both fearful and excited about the future of Malaysia.

My immediate future involved meeting the excited mr. Lee - a namesake of that other martial artist from over the South China Sea perhaps? Maybe…. Anyway we hit it off straight away and he walked us to the room he rents to practice and teach budo. I couldn’t tell you where it was but it was hidden somewhere amongst the maze of Chinatown and it turned out to be a very spacious dance studio – now where have I seen this sort of dojo before?!

Niall was with us of course and he was happy to take a seat under on of the big ceilings fans and if he could take a few snaps that’d be great! Lee insisted that I teach something after I mentioned I had recently come back from Japan. He was hungry for budo taijutsu as he hadn’t as much acces to it as us in Ireland. It was doubtfull whether he was able to get the means to enter Japan for direct training and so took whatever he could from travelers passing through. He had been to a few seminars before and had some germans and english pss through over the years. His own teacher is a Dutch fellow living in Japan who now and then makes it back to KL to teach him.

I was happy then to show him what I learned in Japan and he showed himself to be of the right spirit when he jumped at the prospect of learning some basics as I was shown by master teacher Someya Sensei in Japan in January. The basics are so important in this art but can get very diluted and changed by time passing without correction from experienced teachers. So I started the class with these bascis and after an hour we naturally flowed into more advanced ideas as present by the grandmaster this year in Japan.

By "class" I mean that there was James who I let experience receiving the techniques as he was the teacher there and i others. I don’t know their names but over 2 hours got to know that they were excellent students and certainly would not be out of place in Alex's dojo in Ireland. There was the half Hindu half American trash metal fan, Adrian. He wasn’t studying long but was defo an eager beaver. There were 2 other junior students who were Chinese, by some way or another. The senior students were: a very friendly Chinese fellow who’s name i can’t recall but who was built like a brickhouse besides being a foot smaler than me. He had studied judo bef6re but was well able to hold his power in check and use natural movement instead. Then there was the curious Japanese fellow – a quiet chap of about 60 I’d say who turned out to be a Kendo 4th dan and had been through many other arts himself, Japanese and Asian. He found what i had to show particularily interesting and was very attentive at the Japanese that I used, politely nodding I agreement at my dodgy pronouciation of locks and throws.

After class and a mini photo-shoot – the most important thing at these sorts of things - we went for a bite at one of those street-level tables and got served a load of rice, vegtables, pork stock and soy-sauce. It was delicious and you soon forgot the traffic zooming past 2 inches from your back or the little old man washing dishes or clothes or dead anaimals at the next table.
James plugged me for lots of Bujinkan knowledge but we also chatted about Malaysia, world politics, Ireland, women and anything that could come under the umbrella of "the craic".
He also said soemthing interesting and the Japanese guy was nodding at this.... that Westerners take more interests in Martial Arts these days than the Asians and that he felt they were becoming good guardians of these traditions while most Asian countries plunged headlong into capitalism forgetting these old traditions in the race to catch up with the market place.

It turned out to be his birthday. The guy is an amazing 41……. Must be a friend of Rex’s…. and he had to ruch off to join his family as there was a party for him and his son who shared the same birthday as him. The others scattered too after many handshakes, bows and hugs and we were left with Adrian, the trash metaler who said he’d love to bring us around the place at it was the most excitement he had had in a long few weeks of hard work in KL as a graphics designer. Turns out he was part of a project to sell the new suburbia to KL city-dwellers and rural Malaysian…. The sort of american-dream marketing strategy that we had seen clues of around the city - big buildboards saying things like "Come to Valley Falls where dreams are made for the future ".. and hundreds of construction sites and new roads. It was all quite creepy but
this is how Malysia is going - a weird mixture of Muslim orthodoxy, subtle Chinese influence and Western consumersm.

So we went for coffee somewhere off Chinatown – Adrian was a pacifist hindu vegan tee-totaler – and chatted about music, American military imperialsim – as you do - KL, and of course Bujinkan. He missed his last train home amongst all this banter so we had a bite to eat and a few beers – him more coffee – I can’t imagine what state he was in at the end of the nite! We watched Bill Hicks and other comedy shows on his impressive video iPod. It all ended late into the evening and we went our seperate ways. Somehow it felt like a bizarre day of channel-hopping across one too many cultural TV channels. A carnival of mulinationalism in a slowly homogenised world. I was happy to have found familiarity in the dojo earlier.. a strange sort of kinship in this hodge podge twilight-zoned city!

- The Two Towers

2006-03-19T15:34:00.000-08:00

As expected there was a massive queue at the Patrona towers centre. Most of the throng were other Asians and it really highlighted the diversity of the place – its made up of Chinese, Malay and Indian nationals. We got our free tickets to the 42nd of the 88 floors in total sky-bridge that links the towers and had 2 hours to kill before the 15 minute tour. The massive shopping centre below seemed like a good place to hang out so we went all dawn-of-the dead and joined the slow-moving early-morning shoppers below. Right then we could have been in any city in the world. We were on the search for cheap digital cameras but I reckon we were in the wrong place for that. KL stands out though as being obviously Muslim, as indicated by the tell-tale headscarfs you see everywhere.

The towers tour was pretty cool and allowed us to see the sprawl of KL with the hazed-out mountains on the horizon. This building was built at the peak of Malaysia’s “celtic” tiger but it was hard to tell if the city was doing as well as it once had. On the way back to the “golden triangle” where the hotel was, we saw a curious run-down colonial type building slowly being taken over by the plantlife. There were afew wild dogs patrolling so my first thoughts of jumping over the gate to investigate turned into second thoughts. The place reminded us of the cities past prosperity. We went on the hunt for cheaper cameras at the market are but found them not much less expensive than before. However we remembered that it’s the done thing to haggle so it seems we could get a bargain after all. To be sure we took some notes of the camera types so we could google some reviews/prices and make sure we got a choice option.

While strolling around two Malay ladys – they were defintely non-boys, chatted to us from there al fresco meal and invited us to join them. They weren’t exactly flush with youth although they were very friendly so we made out we just ate and had a rendesvous with some phantom swedish air-hostesses. It turned out they were from Kota Kinabalu where we were going the next morning and they were on the town in KL for the weekend. Visions of international incidents in the bedroom passed through out time-zoned-out minds and we moved on.

- K.L. Jelly

2006-03-19T15:19:00.000-08:00

So we arrive in the sun-splashed melting pot of Kuala Lumpur on Friday afternoon. At the arrival gate we ignored the taxi hawks so as to avoid an overpriced fare. This meant that we also managed to avoid our included-in-the package chauffer and ended up getting a taxi to the city center. J.L is well kicked in – obviously. Autopilot led us to a local bar for beers, street-watching and an early nite. Dublin was still only around the last corner and it wasn’t the oven I expected here, it being only the evening after all. It did have that blade-runner look of a modern asian city going on though. Huge rain droplets were a good sign we were in the tropics but the shower only lasted a minute. In KL it rains every day, but not all day!

Good old J.L. made us waken at lam on our first proper day so I finished off my trashy airport novel "Cell" by Stephen King (I was glad to get it over with) and it took us to a 6am breakfast in the hotel. This was an all-you-can-eat feast of local fare that was more dinner-like than petite dejeuner which suited our mal-adjusted body-clocks. I had massive bowl of strange tropical fruit to finish and we set off for the 2 Towers..hmmm sounds like a familiar tale!!! I don’t think hobbits (or al-queada) used an elevated trains as transport though….

- Going away do @ Doyles

2006-03-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

Cheers for all turning up at Doyles there on Saturday night. It was great craic although i probably didn't get around to talking to most people. Don't know how many shots I had but i lost a few hours between midnight and waking up at home the next day. My sister somehow managed dto losse and find me again i here and directed me home. Mental!

Just got my jabs there so i look forwad to laughing at any giant insects trying to bite me on the ass. Come get some mo-fo's!

Hardy har har!

- Have you seen this guy

2006-03-06T04:04:00.000-08:00

Someone found a video clip of Aphex Twin at Temple Bar Music Center from 2004 and i spotted myself donning some dodgy headgear a la the Windowlicker music video. Classic!

- Second last day in work

2006-03-02T07:56:00.000-08:00

So I borrowed an external hard-drive off Brian in work and ripped the 2 years worth or 11G of music and pictures that i had on my PC. That's 2 dvd's worth of booty to maybe bring with me to d'under.

I sort of reckon Doyles on Fleets Sst is the best spot for the going away malarky. It's gonna be shared with Nial of course and his mate Mel who's birthday it is. She's hosting a party at her grans (who'd ironically in Oz. at the moment) afterwards and if I can get my filthy hands on the decks I'll play some wonderfuly annoying crowdpleasing tunes.

So what's left to do? Niall got the insurance today... 275 each, which covers everything nature can throw at us excluding "triangle induced adverse ankle mutation" according to the small print. I gots to get my anti-rainforest jabs on monday and i believe the tickets have to be collected too. Thank feck i got my teeth pulled this week as thats one less thing to worry about. I don't remember a thing about it but i have been feeling odd all week which isn't suprising when shit's been mechanically levered out of your skull. Isn't dentistry odd?

Tomorrow - goodbye Precision Software... you were a kindly mistress!

- This music is Mrong

2006-02-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

These guys are playing tonight at Legal Eagle and it should prove to be a pretty insane outing indeed. I suppose they're simialr to Ceephax and really shined on the Jpohn Peel tribute show there last year which i managed to minidisc.

[update]
Fantastic set and lots of fun. Where do all these crusty kids come from? Met Redrum and his very cute buddy off xltronic fromManchester. Twas a good laugh with Col and Dara as always and it was well funny trying to chat up that Maria gal! Shitmat was amazing as ever, dancing on the decks in his underwear. I hadn;t seen crowdsurfing in a long time either. The leechrum guys were good too with some very fun multiple tape playing with old Sony walkmen. Weird but it worked brilliantly. As Col says its always good to have a vuisual part to the show. Man all the girls there were just my type - I hope oz has a few like that.

- Art tech

2006-02-23T02:04:00.000-08:00

*Warning* - don't read this if music throws banana skins at your mental pathways

Ripped off U:mack's post at ie-dance.

"Alongside fellow electronic mavericks and Warp Recordsstable mates Aphex Twin and Boards Of Canada, Autechrestand out like supernovas amid one of music'scustomarily starless constellations. Not that you'llfind the Sheffield-via-Manchester duo of Sean Boothand Rob Brown gracing the pages of Heat magazine anyday soon. Shrewd, sphinx-like and fiercely protectiveof their music, they nonetheless remain tantalizing,even awe-inspiring enigmas.

In truth, the plaudits and reverence with whichAutechre have been showered throughout a fourteenyear-long career are simply the fruits of creativeintegrity and consistently fearless experiment. Not tomention an oft-overlooked playfulness and a rarelymentioned musicality.

There are few artists operating in contemporary musicwhose work could be accurately described as'pioneering'. Though they'd doubtless balk at theterm, Autechre probably have more claim on the labelthan most. For theirs is music that, on first listenat least, appears to be without influence a richhermetic sound world that is a law unto itself,adhering only to the constraints of its own internallogic.

But music, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and even'pioneers' have to draw on precedents. In Autechre'scase that means dance music ?more specifically 80s USelectro. Indeed, the notoriously contentiousappellation 'Intelligent dance music', under whosebanner their early albums ?1993's Incunabula inparticular - was blithely shunted, is not entirelywithout relevance here.

Autechre's music may seem, on one level, to be more aproduct of the laboratory than the dancefloor, butstudy more closely their trademark moir? of collapsingelectronic counterpoints, melting wave forms andominous digital thrums and you find ghosts prowlingthe microprocessors. Sly Stone's convulsive drummachine booty shake is there, if you look hard enough,as are imprints of Miles Davis's turn-of-the-70'sgroove abstractions and, naturally, the terpsichoreanthump of vintage electro avatars Mantronix, Cybotron,Grandmaster Flash and their ilk.

The Cape Canaveral from which their wild electronicorbit launched back in 1991, electro still hasvestigial impact on Autechre's hyper-processedsignature and - though it's often overlooked, souncompromising and often overwhelming are their sounddesigns - at the root of the duo's entire output liesa sensual human pulse. In short, Autechre have thefunk.

There is beauty in their music too ?a liquid, alienexotica that's as sensual as it is scientific. Lagoonsof intoxicating acid ambience shimmer decorously evenamid the fury of their classic 1995 Tri Repetae albumand beguiling, crystalline melody lines underpin eventhe most outr? microchip demolition derby on morerecent benchmark longplayers like 1998's LP5 or 2001'sConfield. All of which sets the scene for their latestepistle,Untilted.

The follow up to 2003's critically lauded Draft 7.3,Autechre's eighth full album is a dense yet elegantlyexpansive work that ripples with some of the duo's keysignatures: epileptic rhythmic counterpoints, complex,spiralling melodic cells, immense tectonic shifts inthe low end, dagger sharp glacial crackles in theupper registers. But it also hits straight between theeyes with a raw, almost live-in-the-room immediacy.'We're really cranked up and in a totally differentgear at the moment'. Sean Booth discloses, inreference to the new album. 'It feels like we'reworking in a quite radically different way now; not somuch in terms of the final output ?I'll let othersjudge that - but we're getting ideas down a lotquicker now, trying to make the most of what timewe've got'.

It's an urgency which manifests on the thudding LCC,or the equally unyielding opening passages of IpacialSection, a strange bass end warmth cushioning whatsounds like dysfunctional kitchen utensils trying todisco dance. Pro Radii, meanwhile, is the album's mostthunderous piece ?it's harsh reverberations might besomething inspired by (or even recorded in) the tumultof an Iraq war fire fight, with blasts of percussiveclamour and disturbing shards of human noisespasmodically flashing into frame.

But there are less frenetic moments ?both openingtracks cede to more restful extended codas and eventhe squirming time signature of Augmatic Disporteventually evolves into a dreamily spacious dub pulse.Elsewhere, those electro influences hove firmly intoview on the almost jaunty Fermium ('That_s just ashout-out, really, to people who know. We can't getaway from the fact that we're DJs,' Booth confesses)and while Iera and The Trees forage madly butmeticulously on house and techno's furthest shores,Sublimit is nothing short of clipped space funk.

Those song titles, as with all Autechre designations,seem drawn from a vocabulary as rich, particular andabstruse as the music they frame.'There's definitely a bit of writers like Edward Lear,EE Cummings and Lewis Carroll in there - even someRoald Dahl from when I was a kid', Booth admits. 'Mymum used to read me Edward Lear all the time'.

Indeed, there's an undeniably Lear-like charm to allAutechre's work; a sense of the joyfully surreal thatis further proof that Booth and Brown are sentienthuman beings, not robots. In fact, Autechre are one ofthe few operative musical units who can genuinelyclaim to be exploiting the synergy between technologyand aesthetics, pushing the proverbial envelopeprincipally as artists, not lab-coated technicians. Inthe process they are making some of the only truly21st century music yet minted.

- Nice timing.... n'aut!!!!

2006-02-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

Only the bestest electronicanist act around, autechre, are playing in April in Dublin not 3 weeks after i'm out of here. Oh cruel fate... what a misereable whench you are!!!

Besides Board of Canada.. these are my number one must-see-before-i-exit-planet-earth musicians around.

For those who don't know but maybe give a shit about music, autechre create electronic soundscapes based on rhythmn, loops and melodies that push the limits of something created not being able to change everytime its experienced. I suppose you can call it "organic" in that way. Anyway they're masters of the art and i'll be 100,000 miles away.

- T minus 2 weeks

2006-02-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

So I got a free ticketto the National Concert Hall's perfomance of the works of Steve Reich. I read about this guy a lot in http://www.thewire.co.uk/ and had freinds who recomended him to me so off i went on my tod on sunday night.

It turned out to be a 2 hour gig with about 4 pieces being played. Yep.. looooong pieces of music. But there very nature meant them to be like that as they followed a lot of the patterns of modern electronica. Repetitive loops, building harmonics and that trippy lost-in-time feeling the listener gets. If i had to compare the music to the more familar computer-based stuff i listen to it would be Warp's Autechre for sure. Many melodies layered and twisted with sudden changes that carried the mood into higher imaginings. Breath-taking.

If you were like superman and were able to fly around the worlds natural wonders at your own pace, the Rockies, the artic, rainforests and savanah.... this is what you'd play on your sPod. Which reminds me.. i must do that very thing with Google Earth later on. I\'ve no Steve Reich on my work PC but i'll fish out something to fill the gap... soem Boards of Canada maybe.

This is where i'm going in under weeks.......note that i've moved Ireland nearby for scale. Hope i didn;t cause to much flooding.. mwahah ha ha!!!

- First of my northern hemisphere posts.

2006-02-08T03:38:00.000-08:00

Well I handed in my notice (no probs there) and now there's about 4 weeks to the off. Lots to do till then....

-Dentist for double tooth extraction..... meow!
-Shots for to stop me running around south east asia with malaria
-Party!!!!!!!!!!
- work
- family
- freinds
- budo
One big one? Perhaps.

-Store all my stuff at the homestead.. which will possibly not be the homestead by the time i get back. Lets just download that tune when we come to it.
- Vist some folks outside Dublin
- Do some online networking of ozzie contacts for some sort of bearings

Oh and typical bloody karma... got a sort of job offer 2 hours after i booked my tickets to Ozland. Jesus at this rate i''ll meet the gal of my dreams sometime between now and going away for a year. Zeus... quit pissing in the font!

This is a test post.. the last one didn't get absorbed. C'mon!
Meanwhile, have some carpet...