Awesome prince, get your sleep
Lose your heart in history
Make us laugh or nothing will
I set a fire just to see what it kills

Don’t be bitter, Anna
I know how you think
You’re waiting for Radio City to sink
You’ll find commiseration in everyone’s eyes
The storm will suck the pretty girls into the sky

All our lonely kicks are getting harder to find
We’ll play nuns versus priests until somebody cries
All our lonely kicks that make us saintly and thin
We’ll play nuns versus priests until somebody wins

Leave our excellent souls
Head for the coast

- Matt Berninger

Posted in Flatbeat on Sunday May 2, 2010. Shoutouts.

I’m in the hole
Three thousand days
A buried soul
They live the dream
In terminal
No war too mean

I know the drill
Got cells to burn
I’m dressed to kill
A mortal coil
And time is still
On secret soil

Yeah pay the bills
Cells to burn
Mouths to fill
On Boeing jets
In the sunset make glowing threats

- Robert Del Naja
(Closing track on the stunning Heligoland)

Posted in Flatbeat on Sunday February 28, 2010. Shoutouts.

This might the best use of the Techno Viking yet. See also Slap Chop.

Posted in Vidiot on Tuesday February 23, 2010. Shoutouts.

We must blend into the choir
Sing as static with the whole
We must memorise nine numbers and deny we have a soul
And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won
We must run, we must run, we must run

We must hang up in the belfry
Where the bats and moonlight laugh
We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past
And in the caverns of tomorrow
With just our flashlights and our love
We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

- Oberst

Posted in Shutterbug on Tuesday January 26, 2010. Shoutouts.

The sound of Gilberto from the balcony, and a view over the garden as the black cat stalks moths in the tall, browning grass. She ducks behind the pot plants, until all I can see is the tip of her tail flicking back and forth. I’m finishing a bottle of Cab Sav, and trying to ignore that it’s Sunday.

This week I’ve been living and breathing Blockhead’s latest, The Music Scene, as a soundtrack to petty internal politics and long days and nights. It’s wildly inconsistent, completely eclectic, and altogether wonderful.

Mr Simon can genre-jump with the best of them, and during the sixty minutes of the record, he lurches between downtempo hip-hop, expansive soundscapes, a bit of drum and bass, and even samples a couple screaming obscenities at each other as they claw their way through a domestic, backed by gravely jazz. That’s pretty much where my head has been the past couple of weeks, and I’m glad to have found a soundtrack for it.

Now, which one of you jerks drank my Arnold Palmer?

Posted in Shutterbug on Sunday November 15, 2009. Shoutouts.

On first listen I wasn’t sure what to make of Röyksopp’s latest effort, Junior. Other than the first track, the stand-out Happy Up Here (which also has a stunning video) the album didn’t seem to have either sense of fun (Eple, Remind Me) or the sheer get-on-the-floor danceability (Only This Moment, Beautiful Day Without You) of Melody or Understanding.

Then there was the feeling that guest vocalists Robyn and The Knife’s Karin Dreijer Andersson were being chronically underused. Witness Dreijer Andersson’s stunning vocals on her Fever Ray release this year and compare it to the nursery school chanting on Tricky Tricky (“six afraid of seven, ‘cause seven ate nine”) and you have to scratch your head and wonder what the grand plan is.

Each of the tracks are great individually, but as a whole there is an underlying sweetness to that left me wanting the downtempo and darker side to Röyksopp that balanced the first two albums so well. Then I read a couple of interviews with the band and discovered that the second part of the album, the more moody and atmospheric Senior is due to drop later this year.

I guess it’s a sum of all parts thing, then. Until then, I guess I’ll just keep listening to This Must Be It on repeat and wait for the remixers to get their hands dirty.

Posted in Flatbeat on Sunday May 31, 2009. Shoutouts.

Listening to early Prodigy reminds of Montenegro; concrete-block pool in a bay overlooking the Russian submarine base, and the copper-bitter taste of blood in my mouth as I coughed and watched the stains turn brown on my towel. The pool had a shark-alarm, currents, and after we got out and old man in a worn orange beanie cast a line into the centre and settled against the stands to wait for a bite. We roamed the beach side stalls searching for pirate CDs and booze, and when I finally made it to the doctor he told me it was bronchitis and filled my hands with medicines I didn’t understand.

I listened to music for a jilted generation on loop as we rattled toward then Yugoslavia, the laser guns, whoops and radio chatter in stark contrast to the pockmarked and shattered countryside outside the windows. The legoland hotel we were staying at a gleaming white edifice in a sea of grey, scarred concrete.

Hard to believe that’s more than ten years ago, now. A different world, and one I’m not entirely sad I’ve escaped from.

Posted in Travel on Tuesday March 3, 2009. Shoutouts.

The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland
But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless
While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness

You stopped by, I was all alive
In my doorway, we shucked and jived
And when you wept, I was gone:
See, I got gone when I got wise
But I can’t with certainty say we survived

Then down, and down
And down, and down
And down, and deeper
Stoke without sound
The blameless flames
You endless sleeper

- Joanna Newsom

Posted in Flatbeat on Thursday January 15, 2009. Shoutouts.

you touch the back of your head with your fingers
like a pig with one ear
the hissing beneath
and the whistling in your ears
your eyes closed
and your arms wrapped tight around you

A sky full of angels and the brown-red dirt underneath. Perth was magnificent, and needed, and real. Now recocooned in transit, I reach out for certainty and search for something to clutch at in the interim.

But there are nights I will never forget.

Posted in Flatbeat on Thursday January 8, 2009. Shoutouts.

There is talk of seizing the day, yes, and of “throwing in for the team” but I’m not sure which deity they are expecting me to invoke to find those magic extra minutes.

So, then, this is not about seizing the day. This is about that five minute window between 3:24 and 3:29 every afternoon when the LCD spits phosphors at your face while the sun outside reflects off the fish-silver office buildings and the clouds sit high above.

Slip off the noose, children, and embrace that which should be yours. (mp3, 74mb)

Tracklisting
Pnau – Embrace
The Modernist – The International Loner
Rex the Dog – I Look Into Mid Air
Jeans Team – Faul
Hercules & Love Affair – Blind
Muscles – One Inch Badge Pin
Chromeo – Destination: Overdrive
Cut Copy – Hearts on FIre
The Presets – This Boy’s In Love
Justice – One Minute to Midnight
Pnau – With You Forever
Cicada – You Got Me Feeling
Digitalism – Digitalism in Cairo
The Field – Everday
Underworld – To Heal
UNKLE – Burn My Shadow
Bonobo – Nightlite
Underworld – Beautiful Burnout

Posted in Flatbeat on Sunday June 29, 2008. Shoutouts.