Tomás Ford

Tomás Ford's Disco Bunker: Thoughts On It.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:56:00 +0800

I’m still recovering from my time in Tomás Ford’s Disco Bunker ~~eight weeks~~ eight days later.

It was a pretty awesome experience, I’m kind of weighing up how I thought it went; on one hand theatres are agonisingly middle class, a conventionally seated crowd is really hard to work with and I think the ticketed nature of the event priced out a few people I would have liked to be able to see the show. I’ve forgotten how to read theatre audiences a bit as well, which is an unfortunate side effect of my not working in theatre anymore; I’m totally ninja with festival/pub/club environments but it’s a very different feeling in a theatre.

Apart from those qualifications though, it was pretty much an unqualified success. The reviews have been uniformly excellent (you can read Ben Watson’s great one on my Press Kit page), so I’m likely going to be touring it to a few festivals this year. A lot of things from the show will feed back into my general live act, but there’s quite a few things that are specific to playing in a theatre and the journey I wanted to happen for the audience that I don’t think will work outside of that.

It really knocked me about though - aside from all the time I spent getting the show together, the nature of the gig was that it took a lot of my mental energy, which I didn’t really give the audience a chance to give back in a conventional way. So I was wiped after the shows and although I enjoyed playing them, it actually took a couple of days for me to really appreciate what I’d achieved with them.

Now I have even more ideas for how to progress the show, which is great, because I hate it when I start to feel satisfied and smug about what I do. I mean, feeling smug is a very enjoyable emotion, it’s actually my favourite feeling but it’s not very useful.

Anyway, there are some great shots from the show shot by William Buck for Faster Louder that you really have to go see for yourself. He shot both the early and late shows so you get a really good feel for the way the show went if you look at the whole set.

In other news, I’m back to recording this week and loving it, even if it’s still moving at a glacial pace. It’ll get there. Promise.

I Also Want To Ride A White Horse

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:45:00 +0800

Had a power fun spoken word gig at The Moon this arvo. Though I’d set aside this arvo for blogging, I still haven’t had a sec to chill out since Disco Bunker, so I will blog about the AWESOME goodness of that gig tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I’m watching Goldfrapp videos. The new one (above) is pretty hilarious, almost as good as a track I only recently discovered because it was on an album of theirs I didn’t think I dug, called Ride A White Horse. She feels so fuckin’ dirty. You will want to watch both of these.

Disco Bunker Flashbacks

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:29:14 +0800

Photo by William Buck for FasterLouder.com.au

Well, what a terrible dribbling of shit that last post was.

Coverage for Disco Bunker is slowly starting to seep out of the media; FasterLouder have posted this great gallery of shots from the shows which give you an idea of what you missed out on, and Spaceshipnews have posted the first review and incidentally made me their first “Band Of The Week” in their relaunched (and rather sexy) new site, which aside from being an incorrect use of a word, is rather a distinct pleasure.

There will be quite a lot more reviews and photos to come this week I’m sure, but here’s the first taste if you want to relive the show or check out what you missed. It always makes an interesting read for me to see what individuals’ opinions are on shows, as a solo act I draw inspiration from reviewer opinions, if not always in the way the writer probably intended, so I’m looking forward to them.

I’ll post about the shows and my dj’ing at Future Music Fest tomorrow! Promise! My brain is still twisted into knots from the longest long weekend on record.

TV. Why, TV? Why?

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:34:48 +0800

In the two days since my Disco Bunker (which went off by the way), I’ve had some time to chill out and watch TV. Which is awesome (will post about it tomorrow).

Unfortunately, everything I’ve seen has been SHIT.

I am currently watching Ross Noble recreate Billy Connolly’s 90’s Australian travelogue show. Almost shot for shot. Why is this happening? Surely he is better than this? I mean, I’ve never liked his comedy, but surely he’s at least got some original ideas in his head? WTF?

Last night I endured Scrubs: Medcal School, which I’m being generous to by adding the “Medical School” bit - I think they’re just pushing it as a new series. You can see it here if you want to enjoy the spectacle of a show jumping the shark so far it misses the ramp entirely. I think I counted three characters from the original series, all of whom have significant partners and young children who aren’t mentioned in the show at all - actually, the characters spend all their time on university campus, where they are now teachers, and at various bars. I can only assume that their home life is disintegrating entirely in messy ways that they choose not to talk to each other about, ever.

The other thing I watched was Airways, which has gone from being a vaguely amusing Australian riff on Airport USA/the most hilariously trashy awesomeness around to THE WORST SHIT EVER. It’s basically a long-form ad for Tiger now. At least Airport USA is not at all sympathetic to Southwest airlines and you found yourself hating everyone on the TV. Host Corinne Grant sounds like she regularly works shifts in the terminal herself the way she sides with bitchy check-in supervisors. Ugh.

And to reiterate the opinion of everybody who has seen it, BONO, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS ROXY MUSIC DOCUMENTARY.

TV: I think our relationship may be over. Oh wait, we have DVD’s of The Tudors? This is good news. Period-piece soft porn soap opera. Trashy crap with beautiful costumes and beautiful people. I can dig it.

Anyway, rant over.

Tomás Ford's Disco Bunker SELLS OUT! 10pm Show Added!!

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:01:00 +0800

We’ve sold all our tickets to the 8pm Disco Bunker show. But don’t fret. We’ve decided to add a 10pm show, which you can book tickets for now. Above the 10pm show is a listing for the 8pm show, which reads SOLD OUT. I am enjoying that a little more than I probably should.

I’m really excited. You’re coming, right?

Here’s the dodgy press release I knocked up in an exhausted post-early-morning start for my RTRFM breakfast interview today.

Tomasford.com and Tyranocorp Present
Tomas Ford’s Disco Bunker
8pm SOLD OUT!!! 10pm Show JUST ADDED!!

Tomas Ford expected his Disco Bunker show to be successful within his electro-disco niche in Perth, but he didn’t quite expect the reaction it’s had. Everyone in town, it would appear, is coming.

When the show sold out in presale over the weekend, he was assaulted with emails and facebook messages stressing out about tickets. But fret not. A 10pm show has been added to the night.

If you’re wondering what you can expect from the show, Ford says “I’ve got some amazing new costuming, there’s new video work that’s coming together really well and I’ve designed the show around the room because it’s a very unusual space, so it’ll be a unique experience. I don’t do theatre shows very often at the moment, but they’re great fun for the audience and I find they have a different kind of intensity to them that you don’t get in a pub or festival show.”

Ford’s shows mix up of electro-disco, cabaret and playing with the audience. You might have seen him twisting the minds of audiences at Southbound and Laneway Festivals this year, or in one of his myriad local pub shows. He’s built an audience around the country through touring on his own, well received seasons at Fringe Festivals, as support for Birds Of Tokyo and as part of Big Day Out’s insane Lilyworld lineup.

Despite all this activity, he’s more excited about these shows than anything else he’s done. “In a theatre I have a lot more control over what happens in the room; there’s no distractions. People are really buzzing about this show too, so it’s going to be a great atmosphere to play in anyway, and then I’ll come out and add layers of insane fun to it.”

Tickets for the new show are $20 and are available from Heatseeker.com.au, Planet Video and Mills Records, or there will be limited door sales available on the night. More information is available at http://tomasford.com .

TOMAS FORD’S DISCO BUNKER
8 PM (doors at 7 PM) – SOLD OUT!!
10PM (Doors at 9pm) – JUST ADDED!!
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 27
THE ASTOR THEATRE
659 BEAUFORT STREET
MT LAWLEY

BOOK TICKETS HERE BEFORE THEY’RE GONE!!

King Of The Silent Disco at Future Music Festival Perth

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:21:00 +0800

In what will no doubt be a fucking awesome way to come down from the excellence of my Disco Bunker shows the night before, I’m DJ’ing at the Future Music Festival next Sunday from 6:30-7:30 in the Silent Disco. Come by and visit to warm yourself up for Empire Of The Sun, The Prodigy, Booka Shade and Boys Noize :)

Wooohoooo!

(Mad photoshop skillz. I haz them.)

Lady Gaga Has Her TV Eye On You

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:38:00 +0800

Oh Lady Gaga, you are so batshit crazy. I love you. If you haven’t seen her performance at the Brit Awards yet, even if you don’t like her usually,click the link below, it’s probably the closest thing I’ve seen to the kind of big production art-pop performances Laurie Anderson and Grace Jones used to do in the 80’s.

UPDATE: Oddly, Tumblr won’t let me post this. So click here to look.

The strange thing with Lady Gaga though is that I stumbled across an article at illuminati conspiracy site The Vigilant Citizen that has kind of infected my ability to enjoy her music without suspicion. They deconstruct her over three articles and at least 80% of what they say is bullshit, but like all conspiracy theories, 20% of it is pretty spooky and irrational. The deconstruction of the Bad Romance clip is particularly effective, but obtuse videos like that do lend themselves to that kind of thing. There’s also this and this (part 2 of the first this), which are kind of odd. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think about this site’s suggestions when I look at her videos/photos etc now.

And they give me another great excuse to hate the Twilight franchise. And the fact that anybody could draw anything from Beyonce’s lame “Sasha Fierce” concept character bullshit and the Crazy In Love video is awesome to me. Or the crowning piece of aceness, a deconstruction of the 2009 VMA’s as an occult initiation ritual for Taylor Swift. In the fairly implausible (but well explored) case that’s it’s true, I can only imagine Kanye saying something like “Imma let you finish, but Baphomet was the greatest…”

Aw hell, while I’m on a conspiracy bender, I may as well keep going. Some of this stuff amuses me occasionally, so I might as well share my favourite conspiracy of all time: Denver Airport, it’s absolutely bizarre. Actually, Vigilant Citizen has written about this as well and that’s probably the easiest place to start if you feel like a conspiracy googlethon. There’s something really, really fucked up going on there. Nasty.

On the other hand, WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT? Disco Bunker is just about sold out. Go buy tix NOW!!! Stand by for a further announcement on the weekend ;)

Get Your Pass Into The Disco Bunker! Next Saturday!

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:45:34 +0800

Look, tickets for this thing are burning up faster than if I doused them in oil and threw napalm on them. I’ve been talking to people though, and I get the sense that there’s a lot of people who want to come, and in fact fucking plan to come, who haven’t bought tickets yet.

We’re at the stage now where the 8pm show is just about sold out. We’re considering adding a late show because everybody wants to come and we don’t have room for you all; but we need to know if you are actually going to come, so you need to buy a ticket. If you don’t, we can’t add a 10pm show, and some of you will miss out, which bums me out.

So, a gentle reminder; the show is on Saturday Feb 27 at The Astor Theatre in Mt Lawley. You need to book now at Heatseeker (follow the link) if you’re coming. And you are, right?

I get my finished costumes tomorrow (probably). I’m pretty excited; I had a fitting last week and they’re a big departure from my prior look. It’s slowly impacting on the whole feel of the show, which I’m really excited about. It’s the right time to bring a new style into the show. I think their effect on what I do on stage will probably be a bit slow-release as well; now that I’ve got a new vibe, I can feel my thinking moving in a new direction. It’s exciting.

Anyway, whatever. :) Buy a ticket. Come see the show.

Kinetic Carnival

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:05:00 +0800

So I feel like I need to make up for the intense lamenitude of that last tune a little by posting something pretty awesome. Supermarket are an audio visual funky techno duo I played with at a show at the Crown And Anchor in Adelaide last year. They’re some of the most interesting video artists you’ll meet.

Following that set, I suggested them to Ivan who is the director of the new film festival Kinetic Carnival and he pretty much freaked out about them. The show they’re playing will also feature yours truly. We’re talking about Friday April 2 at City Farm in East Perth. City Farm shows are always amusing; it’s basically a big oldschool warehouse space, everyone’s really friendly. They’ll be performing their soundtrack to silent film The Cabinet Of Doctor Kilgari.

This festival is actually really amazing; if you’re on Facebook, the full three day program is here. Go see some stuff.

Australia! Good News!

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:33:51 +0800

This has recently done the rounds on Twitter. It’s an authentic eastern european party bomb that captures the grace, beauty and most importantly the dignity of our wide brown land and frames it in glittering disco.

It’s shit, I know. But you have to watch if only for the dancers doing “the kangaroo”.

I Went To Bangkok, Instead I Had A Holiday

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:01:00 +0800

OK: So I should write about my trip to Bangkok or I’m pretty much not going to. As regular readers of my blog/twitter/other forms of computer addiction will know, I went to sunny Thailand at the end of January. And it was teh cool.

Trying to remember all the stuff we did is pretty difficult. We were only there for four days but we crammed in enough stuff that it felt like a much longer holiday. We’d kind of forgotten a bit about the exchange rate being so good, so when we got there we were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves super-rich. Unfortunately, we were also super-dumb; almost every person you meet in Bangkok is out to scam you somehow. At first this is quite confronting; like when the first taxi you get in charges you 700 baht for a fairly routine trip from the airport and you almost asphixiate in the back seat because his gas tank is on the fritz. Or when half an hour later, you’re dumb enough to get into a tuk-tuk at the insistence of a friendly man who insists today is a “special day where entry to temples in Bangkok is free”. It was clearly the Bangkok Gem Scam. Yes, a scam so obvious and well known that it has it’s own fucking wikipedia article. Luckily we got out pretty quickly after that and went shopping.

And the shopping was goooooood. I bought shit. I bought a lot of shit. Clothes, mostly. I insisted I wasn’t going to get any clothes tailor made until I had too many 100 baht ($3-ish) long island ice teas and started stupidly window shopping. Next thing I know, I’m inside being measured up for shirts that are, admittedly, fabulous.

We managed to get a few massage-type things in, which was rad as I’ve never really had a holiday where things like that actually happened. Again, crazy cheap and crazy excellent.

What else? Well, we hired a khlong and went out looking at the canals of Bangkok, which from what I gather is a lot like what the city was like before it boomed in the ’90s. That was pretty cool. There are houses falling into the water, next to bizarre concept houses, next to temples… still, the khlong driver was running a racquet of high-pressure souveneir sales and clearly had deals with a few places including a muay thai fighting joint that he pulled us up to and pressured us to check out. He extracted 20 baht from the souveneir ladies on little paddle boats by revving his engine until they coughed up. Uncool, but this is kind of what Bangkok is like. You get used to it and it ends up being a fun part of the city.

One of the most amusing ripoffs was when we asked a tuk-tuk driver to take us to Patpong. He was a little too enthusiastic about it and charged much less than I’d expected. Every taxi and tuk tuk driver in Bangkok wants to take you to Patpong, and most will get pretty vocal about it, so the kickbacks from it must be pretty decent. But he didn’t take us to Patpong. He took us to some random back alley warehouse where they wanted to charge us a stupid amount of baht for entry. We ended up not paying much as we just walked out and they quickly followed us asking “OK! OK! How much you want to pay?”

I bought a ladyboy prostitute/bartender a drink as by that point I was well in the habit of greasing the wheel with small tips and favours (and also because it was fun to buy a ladyboy prostitute/bartender a drink) and we sat down for the show. Which was pretty much everything we could’ve hoped for. They started with ping pong, I’ll put it that way. That’s like U2 opening their set with Where The Streets Have No Name or Scandal’us opening their set with Me, Myself And I (things are about to get odd, so if you’re the prudish type, skip to the next paragraph). From there we enjoyed Girl With Cigarette (woah!), Girl With Amazing Pepsi-sculling Vaginal Cavity (the whole bottle! In! Out! Woah!), Girl With Enormous Length Of Ribbon, Girl With Razor Blades On A String Oh My God and a few other delightfully unpalatable sights. The pepsi thing has stayed with me. I can’t look at cola the same way now. Oddly, we seemed to be the only two people in the place enjoying ourselves. It was full of men who seemed to be trying to look as disinterested as possible. Totally hilarious. We then left, got into a random tuk tuk and asked the driver “that wasn’t Patpong, was it?”. “No.” He said flatly. Hilarious.

We checked out the temple of the reclining buddah, which is almost awe-inspiring enough to make you believe in buddhism, though we channelled that sensation into the purchase of a small jade buddha and some hideous wall art. The wall art was the most amusing scam of the whole trip; a man outside the temple holding a series of identical but slightly differently coloured felt prints, insisting that he was the “original artist”. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him, which is kind of problematic in Bangkok - if you don’t dispute even the most reasonable claim, stupid things happen, like you end up with three identical pictures of a generic south east asian scene in three different colours.

We went shopping at Chakutak night market on our last day there and then Siam Paragon on the way back. Chakutak is fucking awful; about six times the size of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Markets and full of boring crap. But it’s not as bad as the Siam Paragon, which is a generic large shopping centre; full of luxury brands and rich Thais; having not seen too many well-to-do-thai around where we were staying in Banglamphu, I was a bit shocked and said something to the effect of “So this is where all the rich people are hiding.”

That night we did a few random things that were kind of great; fish massage was surprisingly pleasant. You stick your feet in a fishbowl and fifty or so carnivorous goldfish come and bite off your dead skin using their tiny mouths. Once you get past the tickling, it’s like you’re being gently stroked by ten hands at once. Also, we ate bugs. Serious bugs. We started with caterpillars, which reminded me of those bags of “French Fries” chips you can buy over here. We got a bit enthusiastic after that and bought bags of maggots and grasshoppers; the bags were surprisingly HUGE. The maggots had a dusty texture and the grasshoppers were delicious; they spray all the bugs with soy sauce, which the grasshoppers seemed to absorb perfectly so it was like biting into a crunchy soy bomb. We ate too many of them and felt sick. They looked like this:

So much else happened but I realise I’m dribbling on here; we checked out the enormous Chinatown district and accidentally ended up in this rooftop restauraunt where they made us an amazing grilled sea bass, filled us with beer and let us look at their panoramic city view for something like $20 AUD. I got overexcited about going fabric shopping and then we accidentally stumbled over a market where everything was closed except a dozen or so shops containing women sewing amazing drag costumes. That kind of thing kept happening; we pretty much spent our whole trip stumbling over surprise awesomeness.

Obviously I bought some music while I was there and you can find bits and pieces of it on this blog already; I’ll be posting more soon because there’s some interesting stuff there and it’s something a bit different to listen to. And obviously I ate a lot of thai food and it was awesome.

We had a day in Singapore on the way back but it wasn’t much fun; ended up lost in a big shopping centre in the city centre that was full of boring luxury brand shops. The highlight of the last day was wandering around the enormous, visually striking, terribly run Suvarnabhumi Airport and realizing we could bring four litres of alcohol into Australia as we looked at the duty free for bugger all money. Actually, the highlight of Singapore proper was lunch at McDonalds and where I enjoyed their terribly titled Double Prosperity Burger. It is basically a hot beef roll stuffed with the most disgusting burger meat and cheapest gravy you can imagine. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t feel prosperous. But it was an amusingly disgusting dining experience.

So anyway, you should totally go to Bangkok.

Schticky. Graney.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:19:00 +0800

This is starting to feel like my theme song.

I’m actually going to go see Mr. Graney tomorrow night at Rosie O’Grady’s in Perth. You coming?

UPDATE: He’s actually giving away an mp3 of this thing at his site.

Tata Young. She's So Rebellious It Hurts.

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:34:00 +0800

Continuing my Thai pop bender, I just came across some serious so-bad-it’s good awesomenitude. Tata Young’s “Sexy Naughty Bitchy”. Listen to how rebellious she is! She’s all like “I pick all my skirts to be a little too sexy / Just like all my thoughts always get a bit naughty / When I’m out with my girls, I always play a bit bitchy / Can’t change the way I am / Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy me!” Her mouth never takes a holiday! She was always the kid in school who turned up to each class about an hour late*! Ooooooh rebellious! Look at her strutting around in what looks like a set modelled after Bardot’s Poison clip. Actually, the music sounds a bit first album Bardot. The track is from 2006, I guess.

The main reason I like this is that the chorus is designed around the words in the title; it’s pretty much the words that teenage girls would like the most when they learn English. It turns Tata Young’s record into the embodiment of that point when you’re in Year 8 learning a second language for the first time, laughing with your friends about whatever that language’s word for “fuck” is.

This is some seriously awesome awful, so-wrong-it’s-right songwriting; I wish I’d seen her when she was in Perth last year now though I suspect she’s gone all slow-ballad-Christina-Aguilera on us.

*: At my school, our classes were 40 minutes long.

Super Laneway Festival Crowdsurfing Fun

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:57:16 +0800

Epic fun at Laneway. Thanks to Jacinta Matthews for the shot.

Dancing With Myself

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:19:00 +0800

OK, let me explain, because some people, particularly Perth underground party kids, are going to see me posting a Harlequin League clip on my blog and be all like “WTF?” at me on Facebook. To them I say this; sure, on one hand they are one of those noisy guitar-pop bands that you see at every festival and half the gigs around town. But chop that hand off and look at the other one; they are FUCKING GREAT.

Not only are they sweet-talkin’ perfect gentlemen, but with each record they get simultatneously more idiosyncratic and more pop. I mean check this track out; it’s so loud. It’s even louder if you turn the volume up. You don’t hear Sydney bands like Faker or The Scare smashing out something this odd/fun/brilliant. This has me throwing myself around my kitchen like a teenage boy sculling his first six pack of Sub Zero. And I’m listening through laptop speakers. Respect.

lanewaylanewaylanewaylaneway

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:55:00 +0800

Holy shit. Laneway Festival was awesome.

I had three big LED video screens to play with, a crowd of people who were looking for some party action, a big-arse stage on the road between Central Tafe and the WA Library, a bottomless rider bar, a ton of pent up energy to put into the show, an awesome timeslot, an awesome lineup… we like these things here at Tomás Ford. That was a super-fun set. I want to do it again.

I had a few people say to me afterwards “That was a great set, where are you from?” Which I’ve come to learn in Perth is a very high compliment. Our cultural cringe is enormous. It’s always quite fun to reply “Fremantle” or if I’m in a contrary, I’m gonna-fuck-your-shit kind of mood, “Rockingham”.

Who else did I see? Hmmm. Boys! Boys! Boys! Were great as usual, but their fantastic Southbound set was always going to be hard to top for me. Voltaire Twins were fun. Wild Beasts were somewhere beween sexy-style Of Montreal and a sex scene from a Twilight movie, so I was a bit confused about weather to get into them or not. Hockey were pretty great for a new hype band, even if their songs aren’t much to write home about they’re tight and interesting enough. I’ll wait for their next record before I committ to fully digging them though.

NASA were scarily awful, like walking into the rave scene from the movie Go. Scratching and mashing up things that shouldn’t be mashed up and doing a lot of shouting “Peeeeeeeeeeeerth!” with delay on their voice. I had my own little Perth-cringe moment when their MC said something along the lines of “This is the last show of the tour so we want a pumping crowd! And the crowds are always pumping in Perth!” Oh dear, I fear you are either lying or very inexperienced in positive crowd reactions.

My non-Me highlight of the day was sitting sidestage for Florence And The Machine. Girlfriend has moves. What an amazing show; I’d never really listened to their music before, but as a performer Florence is entrancing. Her band is tight and inventive despite basing their songs on classic rock sounds; I can’t say I’ve seen anything like her before. Her presence is what I’d expected from Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but not recieved at Southbound. Her voice is amazing, but it’s more the sensation of total raw emotion you get from watching her sing. Fantastic.

Plus, bitch climbed the lighting scaffolding in 3 inch heels. I was in awe.

Again! I want to do it again!

Final Music Video Post. Mind In Ruins.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:39:30 +0800

My mind is still in ruins from this grant application. But I just had my mind blown by this hyper-psychadelic bizarro freakout from Dan Deacon. It’s twelve minutes long but it will destroy your ability to control yourself. Nice work.

Die Antwoord

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:10:51 +0800

Sorry, I know it’s two music video posts in one day, but this video just blew my mind. Watch it.

Just Back From Bangkok

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:53:24 +0800

Got plenty of Bangkok stories to tell you, but not today. Today I’m writing a grant application and listening to a dvd of top 40 songs from around asia I picked up in the market there. This has led me to discover the intense lameness/awesomenitude of Super Junior, who are kind of like an all male, thirteen member, semi-acrobatic Korean version of S Club 7, but with a revolving door cast like in Young Talent Time. One of them is slightly chubby like Gary Barlow was in Take That. He’s my favourite.

There are now spin-offs, the most successful of which is Super Junior-M. I like them in particular because they’re not afraid to use bad early 90s rave pop orcherestra hit lead parts in their songs. It sounds awesomely tacky. I suggest checking out their track Super Girl, which I’ve included below.

I started working on some new material while I was in Bangkok and it’s pretty surprising to see where my songwriting is going. The album after the new one will be pretty interesting. Don’t want to say too much yet though, it’s bad creative juju to talk about the process to much while I’m in the middle of it.

Anyway, who wants to talk about me right now? I just want to talk about Super Junior.

Laneway! Feb 6! Not Far!

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:26:00 +0800

Laneway Festival playing times are out. On one hand, I’m a bit bummed that I’m playing at the same time as Daniel Johnston. On the otherhand, I’M IN THE SAME FUCKING TIMESLOT AS DANIEL JOHNSTON! Even better, I’m programmed between kinda great indie-dance band Hockey and kinda amazing afro-disco kids The Very Best, who would have been the highlight of my festival anyway but who I will now be able to grunt at uncomfortably by way of greeting as their crew tries to set their gear up as I pack down.

This show is going to be a lot of fun, and very different from my Disco Bunker show at The Astor on the 27th, so if you’re at Laneway and in the mood for some of my kind of schtick, it’d be great to see you.

Personally, I’m also excited about seeing Florence & The Machine and NASA, though reports of the latters’ set at Shape last year were that it was the kind of DJ show where they didn’t look like they were actually doing anything. My tip for secret surprise though is Radioclit, whose remixes have been consistently interesting since they started, even notwithstanding the party-starting joy of their recent African cultural imperialist direction. So I may just hang around the TAFE stage drinking my rider and dancing awkwardly after my set, actually.

Make sure you get down early to catch Boys! Boys! Boys! - the latter’s set at Southbound was the highlight of my bandwatching there. They are getting to be world-beatingly good. Both are great acts and proof of the boom in awesome discopartymusic happening in the city at the moment.

Anyway, Laneway is going to be excellent. Do come.