Current adventures in pop music: "Silence like the wind overtakes me..."

Dan Deacon is coming back to Australia, in support of his new album Bromst and that's pretty exciting. It's actually kind of amazing now that I think about it. Ever since being introduced to the video for his song The Crystal Cat (directed by Jimmy Joe Roche) by a friend of mine last year, I've been a tremendous fan of Deacon's warped electronics and squirrel vocal stylings. Should you be able to find a retailer in Sydney that stocks it, his album Spiderman of The Rings comes highly recommended as it is the ideal soundtrack for most things.

Whilst his recent live shows have incorporated many numbers of musicians, this run of Australian shows will apparently see Dan Deacon playing solo. As the above image by Mick Ø and this video show, this will not necessarily be a bad thing.

If you would like to hear Get Older from Dan Deacon's new album Bromst, you can do so here.
If you would like to download almost all of Dan Deacon's back catalogue, you can do that here.
If you would like to hear or download an interview with Dan Deacon on The Sound of Yound America, where he discusses things like his history in composition and the evolution of his performance style, well, you might want to do that here.

"An elegant weapon for a more civilized age..."

If you were to believe the myth, apparently when Nintendo unveiled their motion-sensing, remote-shaped controller for their Wii console in 2005, the world's collected fanboys all simultaneously muttered the word "lightsaber". Since the console's release in 2006, the nerds have been left wanting for a game to deliver on such a promise. Rest assured my friends, the end is sight.

Lucasarts, the game production house owned by George Lucas himself, is preparing for the release of The Force Unleashed, a Star Wars videogame coming out some time this year on any format that possibly stands to make money. The game apparently takes place during episodes III and IV, attempting to fill in part of the 20 year gap between Anakin Skywalker's emergence as a walking iron lung, and Luke Skywalker's teen angst somewhere on Tatooine.

But who cares? If you want to get your Mace Windu on, the Wii version has got you covered. The "duel mode" promises as much lightning-wielding, force-choking action as you can waggle out of your wiimote. There's video of it here, and be damned if it doesn't make the ten year old inside you burst with glee.

Of course if you can't wait til September and you have a macbook with an intel chip, there is always this. But keep in mind I take no responsibility for what happens to your $3000 laptop if you use it.

The robots are coming.

Daft Punk / Modular's monstrosity of ridiculousness, Never Ever Land, arrives in Sydney this evening. I'm going, and maybe you are too. I really don't want to descend into gloating territory; chances are if you aren't going you will be soon attending events that I haven't managed to get tickets to [namely, anything at the sydney festival]. Nevertheless, I am more than a little excited about this. It quite possibly will be the best thing ever. At least the best thing ever for those who like robots, dancing to robot-made-music, pyramids, and lights... lots of lights.

"How long can we look at eachother..."

In a stroke of genius that's surprising myself in a way a blog post is never really going to describe properly, I'm currently rendering a new video work that features a seamless loop of a section of You're The Voice by John Farnham. It's quite possibly the most vile act of boredom I've yet produced, and I'm alarmingly comfortable with this.

As I said to a friend of mine yesterday, "I can feel my powers growing".

That's not a moon... It's a money vaccum!

You do realise that while you are sitting there reading this, you could be spending your hard earned cash on a special edition Transformer that starts off as the Death Star and turns into Darth Vader, and another that starts off as the Millenium Falcon and breaks down into Han Solo and Chewbacca. It's just a matter of what you find important I guess.

[03.01.08 - Over Christmas I saw an ad on TV for the Darth Vader / Death Star number. This thing is available in Australia.

Seriously, what are you still looking at this for?]

Newcastle migratory season 2007.

The October long weekend means a number of things in New South Wales; like the AFL grand final on Saturday [alright, that might be more of a Victorian thing, but just go with it OK?], the NRL grand final on Sunday, and a day off on Monday to recover from the hang over. For a large group of artists, musicians, writers and other miscreants however, it means trying to find somewhere to sleep in Newcastle [and trying to work why you didn't learn from your mistakes last year and book accomodation earlier this year]. Now in its seventh year, the This Is Not Art Festival provides refuge to a number of oddballs and curiousities over four days and four smaller festivals - Electrofringe, The National Young Writers Festival, Sound Summit and Critical Animals.

I'll be running around town committing a number of acts of mischief in the name of Electrofringe. My video Ducks Should Be Free From Persecution will be showing as part of the Electroprojections screening series. On Thursday night I'll be stalking Newcastle's walls armed with a video projector and a power generator. Next Monday I'll be taking over TIN Radio with Ben Byrne to present two solid hours of something between 20:30 and 22:30 and this Friday I'll be presenting ElectroPopQuiz!, which may well just be my finest hour.

Taking place at the TINA Festival Club between 17:30 and 18:30, ElectroPopQuiz! will be your opporunity to flex your intellectual muscle over a range of topics that potentially you and most likely far less actually care about. Think of it as Wednesday night pub trivia hosted by your high school electronics club. It'll be sensational, I guarantee. And there's prizes too. All the trimmings.

If you're planning on entering, I suggest you bring a nerd along for back up. You have been warned.

"my headphones : they saved my life"

While we're on the topic on banalities, I went out and bought new headphones earlier today and they're freaking amazing. And it only cost me $29.95. Think about it; completely amazing only costs twenty nine dollars and ninety five cents, who would've thought it? Well, compared to the $5 wires that emitted noise that I used before these, pretty much anything would be wouldn't it? And google agrees with me; according to some random website I pulled up whilst pursuing my various options for aural enlightenment, cheap headphones can damage your hearing. Sure, there was absolutely nothing offered to back this up, but I'm more than happy to go along for the ride in the name of idle consumerist ideals. The important thing is that I've reclaimed the soundtrack to my life, and my inner sanctum is all the better for it.

Current adventures in pop music: "Don't make me hold your hand through the whole boring summer..."

Since first discovering them via their single Cry in 1998, I've been a very large fan of The Mavis's. I like to look at that particular era of my adolesence as the point where I began to realise that there may be interesting music on stations other than 2Day FM. At the same time, Cry was still very much pop enough that I still felt like I had a connection to my past as a someone with a more than mild appreciation for Roxette. Over the years I've somehow managed to acquire a number of their singles from the period between their second album Pink Pills [released in 1998] and their dispanding in 2001, but somehow never managed to buy any of their albums. Whilst sifting through a $10 rack in a music store in Newtown a few weeks ago I managed to come across a copy of their final album Rapture, which caused somewhat of a joygasm on my part. Aside from the fact that most of The Mavis's catalogue is difficult to come across in the first place [I'm pretty sure that most of, if not all of it has been deleted], Rapture is particularly notorious because it played a small role in the band's dispanding.

[At this point I'd like to note there may be some errors in my account of events, but while I can't back up anything here with specific examples, I'm pretty sure this is how things happened.]

Scheduled to be released in 2001, Rapture was preceded by two singles, Coming Home and Happiness [which was launched as backing track to a Coca Cola commercial, and would later be used in a series of promotions for Hyundai]. The Mavis's label, White [an imprint of Mushroom records] collapsed just before the album's release [This may have had something to do with the buyout of Mushroom records by Lachlan Murdoch's label Festival, thus becomming Festival Mushroom Records, or FMR, but I honestly can't remember exactly]. With the album pushed in to bureaucratic limbo and possibly never seeing a release, frustration (amongst other things most likely) led to the band calling it a day. A slapped together best-of called Throwing Little Stones was released soon after the split, and contained five tracks from Rapture. Protesting from fans saw the album given a proper release in 2002, though the cover art still states the original 2001 date.

So now you know. Despite being around for about ten years, it was the period between the release of Pink Pills and their split in 2001 in which they burned brightest, but never really succeeded in ascending to the outer reaches of the pop statosphere. More Daniel Kowalski than Kieren Perkins, so to speak. Following the break up, various members of the band emerged in other outfits [such as co-vocalist Becky Thomas's current outfit Beki and The Bullets], but pretty much all existence of The Mavis's has been relegated to second hand music stores and ebay. But that's where the social networking comes in. Some good soul has started a myspace page in honour of The Mavis's, and in true fashion it's badly laid out and not great to look at. But then maybe it's better that way. The page also links to video of Cry and Naughty Boy posted on you tube [and if you dig hard enough, you can even find Matt and Becky Thomas backing up Paul McDermott on a version of Lou Reed's Perfect Day (like how everything connects... I sure do) recorded for the first episode of the short lived Good News Weekend], along with two tracks from Pink Pills, a demo, and a version of Burt Bacharach's Walk On By, recorded for the all-Australian tribute album To Hal and Bacharach.

To channel Molly Meldrum for a moment [and believe me only a moment], do yourself a favour and allow yourself the opportunity to stream Cry through your speakers. You can't tell me it's a bad thing [there are about three people I can think of off the top of my head who may try and tell me it is... so they don't count]. In this humble little fanboy's opinion, your life will quite simply be better for it.

The words "Completely," "Freaking" and "Amazing" are something like what I'm after.

Rage have a competition running where you can program a playlist of 20 videos. Wow. Ten kinds of wow even. The fierce competitor within me is quite upset that I'm posting this; as if I had control of some incredible secret that could change the world, as long as I don't tell anyone else about it. But this is too important to keep to myself... plus I'm sure you would find out anyway.

Do me a favour though. If you win, please program "Babe, I'm On Fire" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; making sure that's it's the full 15 minute version, as opposed to the 3 minute single edit. That thing needs to be seen by as many people as humanly possible.