Last week was superintense but rather rad. Tuesday night I hosted the Amnesty International edition of Cottonmouth, which was full of pretty flooring spoken word. Then the Alternative Edition of my monthly Pop Quiz at Ya Ya’s. Thursday night was Raw Hyde (more on that in a sec) and Friday night I had a blast running amok at the FTI 40th Birthday Party in Princess May Park in Fremantle. I’m kind of in recovery mode at the moment but mostly working on the design for the packaging and a 2012 CALENDAR we shot pictures for during the album shoot, which is going to blow your miiiiind.
Back to Raw Hyde though, which has been going excessively well. It’s an “Open Mic Saloon” but we supplement the format with feature comedians, bands, spoken word and whatever performance art wierdness that comes across our desk. It happens at the refurbished Hyde Park Hotel, and any readers from Perth will know the significance of the Hydey before it’s refit; it’s actually been a great experience, the venue have been fantastic, but I’ve wanted to do an oldschool punk rock hydey night there for a while. So the last one was a bit of a pet project of mine; The Bible Bashers, Joe Bludge from The Painkillers, The Spitfires and Frozen Ocean tore the room a new arsehole with blistering sets. It was most pleasant. I took some crap photos:
Laith Tierney from The Bible Bashers, who have just launched this double A-Side:
The Spitfires who have just released this vid for their single Smile:
Frozen Ocean who have just released a great LP called Snoises:
Joe Bludge from The Painkillers, who have let me have all kinds of wierd ways with their song Love Cancer. This was one of my favourite ways:
Anyway, it was a rather satisfying night. You should come down if you live in Perth, every thursday night we program some kind of awesome fun wierdness. Good things happen at about 9pm.
Prerelease Strangeness And Pent Up Oddity
What a strange little time I’m having at the moment. Slowly bringing together the bits and pieces of my album release (and calendar, which is a really stupid but awesome thing that I’m going to be announcing properly soon). It’s a lot of emailing back and forth with a lot of people, a lot of photoshopping and a lot of, to be honest, pretty boring shit. But it’ll be worth it when I can give it to you early next year in exchange for your coins.
The roadcase I talked about a few posts ago finally came, along with a whole stack of new equipment, and it’s beautiful. I’m really excited to get into reworking the show; I’m going to be spending some time on it over December, hopefully I can get something fresh together for the new year, but I suspect it will be a longer process. I’m actually really enjoying my current setup at the moment anyway so I’ll be happy to play around a bit more on that. It’s fair to say that what I’m putting together is going to really take the live show to the next level though.
Absolutely dying to get out on tour at the moment. Tomorrow night I play Fremantle Town Hall for the Big Swingin’ Ball as part of Fremantle Festival. The Town Hall is a one of those fantastic big old rooms that’s going to be a fucking blast to desecrate with my antics. It’s an unusual bill for me too, which always means things will be a bit more interesting; it’s pretty much a guarantee that there will be a fresh batch of punters that won’t have seen me before along with the (always welcome) veterans.
While I’m writing, can I draw your ears to the Naik remix of I Feel Dirty? I love it and I think you should download it if you haven’t already. It makes my shitty car stereo sound AWESOME.
Kelleberrin Road Trip
Last sunday, I set out on an epic adventure with my long-time collaborators Shaun Ferraloro (photographer of virtually every press shot you’ve ever seen of me) and John Aliaga (directed my ‘Til Death Do Us Part clip and shot the footage for my background visuals with me) to the sleepy WA wheatbelt town of Kelleberrin. If you’re not from Western Australia (or simply have no idea what I’m on about), it’s about three hours east from Perth. Australia being Australia, the geography is completely different out there. Huge cornfields, distant trees and shrivelled lakes. The town itself is basically a main street with a small patch of houses surrounding it. In the middle of the main street is this:
I don’t want to show you the inside yet, but inside this is a big, run down art deco theatre called Aurora. An amazing woman named Janelle Cugley runs the space, and we were lucky to be allowed to shoot in there. Especially at night, the building is the perfect setting for the person I become onstage as it basically looks the way the inside of my head must look.
We did 25 shots, plus a music video over 14 hours. It was a long, long shoot, starting at 2:30 in the afternoon and going laaaaaate. This is me just after 4:30, after shooting what I think will be the cover shot:
At this point, this was as far as I could open my eyes.
I can’t wait to share these shots with you and the film clip we shot… and THE ALBUM THAT THEY’RE FOR!!! All of these things are going to be coming out incredibly soon. I don’t know about you, but that makes me very excited.
Back to Aurora, I’m hoping to do some work out there next year, it’s an amazing space that’s perfect for me to work in. And, without being a tool about it, being out there sparked a whole different set of musical ideas that I’d like to explore. Not that I’m short on them at the moment, I’ve got songs for about five different album ideas spewing out of my brain. I don’t think it’ll be long until I’m making LP #3…
I’m working on a new live setup that I’m hoping to have ready in time for summer. There’s a few changes to how I do things I want to make - my current live setup is awesome but I want to be able to interact with it more, and I want to go back to having each song as its’ own song rather than as a continuous set. Plus I generally like to go over my arrangements at least once a year and give them a bit of a spruce up.
Not to mention that everything in my rig is broken and needs to be replaced, so what better time.
As part of that, I’ve just ordered a roadcase to fit my new setup. It will look a bit like this, but with more flashing lights and less boxes and mathematic things.
Zombies Do Not Officially Make Up Part Of The 99% But They Have Just As Many Economic Issues
Quite unintentionally, I created a costume for this years’ Thrill The World that could be a character from the universe of You Have Nobody To Blame For This Apocolypse But Yourself. Thrill The World, if you’re not familiar, is an annual attempt to set a world record for the most people simultaneously dancing the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s Thriller. ‘Tis fun.
With CHOGM happening in Perth this weekend, the #occupy stuff happening everywhere and momentum building around the idea of having a look at how corporate interests are allowed to behave… this kind of stuff is just kind of floating around my head a lot at the moment. And, as is usually the case with me, it seems to have manifestated itself in the form of something rather, uh, silly.
Unfortunately only about three people got the joke. Most were confused by it and two people were grossly offended (which either far too few or too many). So it could be considered a bit of a costume misfire, if I were to think that way. Which I don’t. I think it was awesome.
PS: I have just been announced for the zombie themed (!!!) NEW BEGINNINGS festival on the New South Wales central coast (just south of Newcastle). Headliners are lovely gents Grafton Primary, Peter Coombe and the Vengaboys. Tell me that’s not awesome. You can’t. Because it is.
Zombies ≠ Armies
Short post today but I thought this was hilarious; while rehearsing my Injured Ninja remix with the band for their launch on the weekend, I discovered my version is based entirely on a misheard lyric. What I heard as “We move as zombies that live through the chaos and blood” is actually “We move as armies that live through the chaos and blood.”
Lucky I like my misheard version better, innit.
In other news, Sydney’s Simo Soo has just released his new record and it’s the wierdest thing you can do to your stereo. His music is so hyperactive it makes red cordial seem like NOTHING. He’s unleashed some totally uncomprimising wierd pop strangeness.
Speaking of uncomprimising musical awesomeness, I played Like Junk’s launch show for their new 3” floppy disk single Faceache on the weekend and they totally slayed it live. They really are one of my favourite live bands in Perth, on record they sound leftfield (which I like too) but they really hammer it home live. I hope they put out an LP, I think once they have an album full of this stuff together they’ll start to connect with the kind of audience they’re looking for.
You Have Nobody To Blame For This Apocalypse For Yourself
Injured Ninja asked me to do a remix several months back and I’d been slowly piecing together an instrumental, beats-oriented remix, using a few grabs of their vocal. It was good but to be honest I wasn’t really feeling it much as there’s a very fine line to be walked with using heavy music in electronic stuff; it’s very easy to sound like Limp Bizkit.
I saw Mathas perform his remix (above, totally amazing) for this LP at Abbe May’s album launch and his remix saw him rapping over a beat that stayed very faithful to the original. It opened up the idea of doing a song using their samples instead of a beats thing; with the track this is based on, Our Bodies, it’s been through two quite different recorded versions already, and it seems to be one of those songs that evolves to suit wherever the bands’ headspace is at the time. So I felt like I had a bit of liscence to take some choice elements from the album mix and push them in whatever direction I wanted, though I also wanted to maintain some of the thrashy intensty of the original (below).
By the time I made it, I didn’t have a lot of time of overthink things, so this kind of just exploded onto my Ableton Live screen. The first night, as I was putting the basics of the track together, I scrawled lyrical notes that I pieced together to lay down as a vocal at 3am in one take (hi neighbours! Hope you like blues howling!).
A couple of nights’ editing later and here it is. One of the strangest songs I’ve made in a career built on some admittedly pretty wierd shit. Have a listen and click the “buy” link to pre order a CD copy of the remix album with an awesome bonus poster for $13 aud.
I Made A Thing From A Different Thing By Some Other Person
I found this in the depths of my archive. I figure you may as well have it if you want it. It’s a bootleg remix; if you like it, head over to Beatport and buy his amazing Make It Yellow EP.
It’s a been a few months of clicking around with my good pal John Aliaga on this one, but it’s finally done. May I present to you, the finished video clip for my collab with Ze!, ‘Til Death Do Us Part…
This was a blast to work on - following an enjoyably chaotic shoot that incorporated an op-shop shopping spree, we ran around my managers’ house following a heavily improvised shooting script. It was almost as fun as playing the song live with Ze when we toured a few months back; by the end of the tour we were really bouncing off each others’ energy on stage, which is not something I get to do a lot of.
I produced this track at home and spent a lot of time getting all the floating layers and hooks in it to sit in the wierd-pop space I had in mind. We wrote our own lyrics; I remember getting Ze’s initial vocal contribution and being pleasantly shocked by it. Far from the glam electroclash of her other stuff, she slammed a disco murder ballad on me. As you can imagine, I was a little excited. A thousand mix-revisions later, we ended up with this thing.
It was avaliable as a free download a few months ago to coincide with our tour and picked up a stack of downloads; we’re re-releasing it commercially now, so you can get it at my Bandcamp site or on iTunes.
If you missed all the Ze!-related tour crazy crazy awesome funtimes, you can find out more about her at http://ze.com.my - this is what she does when she’s not trying to kill me:
Absolutely dying to get out on tour at the moment. Tomorrow night I play Fremantle Town Hall for the Big Swingin’ Ball as part of Fremantle Festival. The Town Hall is a one of those fantastic big old rooms that’s going to be a fucking blast to desecrate with my antics. It’s an unusual bill for me too, which always means things will be a bit more interesting; it’s pretty much a guarantee that there will be a fresh batch of punters that won’t have seen me before along with the (always welcome) veterans.
