Category: Blog posts

Bob Lefsetz was over here for the Immedia conference. His keynote is online and well worth a listen. You can almost hear the jaws dropping in the room.

His taste in music is, well, terrible. But his ideas are great.

A lovely discovery on Static Caravan is Serafina Steer. With tracks produced by Mike Lindsay from Tunng and a style that plots a course between Joanna Newsom, a British version of Linda Perhacs, and New Buffalo, Steer’s debut album Cheap Demo Bad Science is a wondeful, albeit short, listen. Oh yeah . . . she plays the harp.

Here’s the stop motion clip for Tiger which also appears on the CD.

Oh . . . and here’s a live song too.

I’ve been asked to write a chapter for a book on Australian electronic music. I’ve got the chapter on the early-rave explosion of creativity in terms of local production. And it has had me thinking and reminiscing.

I was just reading some threads in a Sydney ‘old skool’ group on Facebook and had a sudden memory of seeing The Beloved play at the Phoenecian Club in 1990. That was the first proper ‘dance party’ I went to . . . Greta, my girlfriend at the time, and I were totally unprepared. Her sister, Renae, was a couple of years older and went to the Hordern parties of the time but didn’t really give us many hints as to what to expect.

We hung around in the carpark out the back for ages, then got up the courage to get in the door – they were using the rear entrance rather than the main front doors – in hindsight, probably because of licensing reasons. They came on around 3am and I think we stuck around for about 5 songs because we were knackered. I think one of the other DJs Jacqui O, played a couple of Happy Mondays remixes earlier on and a stack of Balearic and acid house which pretty much went over our heads.

It took another year till I ‘got’ it in terms of dance parties via a couple of indie crossover Madchester nights. There was a particularly crazy one I remember at the Black Market. Baggy pants and tie-dyed hoodies galore in 1991, then it was off into warehouses and abandoned buildings beginning with one of the Psychosis parties.

Ahhhh . . . The Sun Rising . . .

It has been nearly 10 years since I listened to Omni Trio’s early EPs on Moving Shadow. I rarely ever played them out when they came out – they were too full of piano breakdowns, diva vocals and syrupy synth breakdowns to fit into the kind of sets I was spinning at the time (German techno, then later screwface techstep, acid breaks and moody blunted trip hop if I remember correctly). But for some reason I hung on to them.

Listening to them again now you can hear the kind of proto-memories that Burial’s choices in vocal samples call upon – post-hardcore melancholy – that would be first reflected through UK garage at the tail end of the 90s. The rhythm science is what makes Rob Haigh’s tracks really interesting. These EPs (collected on The Deepest Cut Volume One) were a bridge between anthemic ‘ardkore and more drum & bass – skittering drums, hyperchopped breaks, micro-time stretches – and those bass drops. These were also the EPs that triggered the ultimately short-lived ‘intelligent drum & bass’ movement before it petered out with ‘jazzy’ rubbish and was then overrun by the brutalist darkside of techstep ushered in by Ed Rush, Trace and others.

I don’t listen to drum & bass anymore and haven’t for quite a while but listening back to these and those early Metalheadz releases reminds me that there was something quite special going on in the 90s before it all got codified and suffered genre-cide.