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December 8, 2008 
1 Comment He is Faux Pas
parts of sound arrange into musakedelica
1 Comment version 4: october 15, 2008. almost there… stay on target…
been quiet for a bit - if you’re reading this, it means i’ve successfully moved web hosts. iamfauxpas is now proudly slutted up against the unbearably fetishisable (mt), and we’ll see how that goes. so far, its sexy.
speaking of sexy. idol. i got into it this year. what fascinated me this year of all years? drunk astroboy? andrew g’s obvious battles with the wardrobe and hair departments - dude did his best to show how NOT to wear a suit as a man who isn’t stick thin like drunk astroboy. unbutton your jacket, dude, i kept screaming at the television. andrew g cuts a fine figure but spent most of the season looking like a barrel wearing a suit with an andrew g head stuck on top.
i was also bewitched by ricki-lee to some extent, i’m still not entirely sure why. strike that. i know exactly why.
did i ever tell you i wandered the streets of perth one night with a microphone and a cardboard andrew g mask? yeah that was ME interviewing you while we queued up to get into that bar
i didn’t really pledge allegiance anywhere during the show’s run but i think in the end my favourite was the husky melburnian foghorn leghorn.
i was as intrigued by his shocking resemblance to foghorn leghorn as i was disappointed by his failure to sing “campdown races” not even once during the course of the show.
for real. mark spano, your sex was on fire. buff dude from “the lost boys”, your sax is on fire. (thanks yerock)
version 3: october 4, 2008. four days later.
percussion students play “axel f” in the streets of the italian town of portogruaro. perfect soundtrack for a sunny (almost-)summers day in melbourne.
interrupting the play-by-play on that inquiet remix - sunday afternoon seems like a good time to drop a few notes on what music i’m listening to at the moment. nothing too fancy, just feels a little overdue.
traffic sounds leigh (host of 2ser’s tape relay who, as far as i can tell from stalking her on mess+noise, is currently whooping it up with some kind of vincent chase lifestyle) recently put me on to eero johannes, for which i’m very grateful. he is a finnish dude signed to planet mu who is the torch-bearer for an underground movement of funky scandinavian chiptunez weirdly named “skweee.” the skweee movement moves into the spotlight, with a recent feature event on sonar and, of course, a wikipedia entry.
its scandinavian, so yeah, of course its too cool for itself and way too much fun. here’s a video sampler from skweee label harmonia (eero johannes from about 1:46 with skweee anthem ‘we could be skweeroes’ - yeah, seriously):
so fun, funky, so nerdy.
what else is around here… i went out to a bar at QV last friday night and the DJ played diamonds on the soles of her shoes, technically a tood terje edit but i didn’t figure that out until later. so i went and found that, and its dumb fun. then i went and found about 20 other todd terje edits, and couldn’t really figure out what the fuss was about. same DJ played this weird holy ghost vs the message thing that was pretty bad but reminded me what a mind-blowingly great sound “hold on” has.
i’ve been getting into a couple of tracks from a label/website called moodgadget.com - a label which, as far as i can tell, has several of their artists on extended loan to ghostly (mux mool, jdsy, reflecting skin). ghostly swim was such an amazingly strong compilation (and free too!) and one of the tracks thats really holding up for me from that comp is from moodgadget’s mux mool. not sure exactly how to track the threads on the moodgadget/ghostly connection, but anyway moodgadget put out a compilation of electronic artists earlier this year called “the synchronicity suite” which acts very much like a companion piece to ghostly swim, and has some great finds on it - the greatest being, easily, a track caleld “glad i met you” from d. gookin.
MP3: Mux Mool - Night Court
MP3: D. Gookin - Glad I Met You (from xlr8r.com)
i can’t quite get into the alexis taylor record, its hard to figure out what its trying to be, if in fact its meant to be anything other than a collection of castoffs and throwaway recordings (which i think essentially it is meant to be). covering mccartney “coming up” seems obvious but its hard to hate such a loving rendition. alexis taylor’s “coming up” and max tundra’s “coming up” are like very odd bookends that now sit on either side of that early 80s mccartney pop gem.
ahhh. the new kieran hebden vs steve reid is cool, more engaging than the earlier collaborations i think. its cool that they are just putting out whatever they do, you might not enjoy every record but you can hear their process developing which is fun. trying to get into the new skeletons record but its even harder to listen to than the last. i gave the last record a lot of latitude i think because i was so enraptured by the more accessible tunes. this one… i hope it grows on me.
These hats are awesome :3
i became completely obsessed with this song a couple of weeks ago. it holds within it the secret of all music, and indeed, life and time and space. you think i’m joking? i want to throw away whatever ideas i’ve ever had about music and just start a new movement based only on what is contained in this song. you think i’m kidding? i want to coat myself in honey and jump from a tall building onto a giant piece of sourdough. you think i’m fooling around?
also - i want to meet that dad. whats your dad like?
version 2: september 30, 2008. five days later. i sit down for another couple of hours. cue the four to the floor.
inquiet is a lovely chap named sam who founded melbourne’s rad diy label brothersister records with a bunch of his talented friends. i asked sam if i could remix a song from the record that he just put out - which is called “inq beyong”, by the way, and is really accomplished and good - and he said sure, so thats one of the things i’ve been working on lately.
i thought i’d do something new here on the blog, something i haven’t done before. its probably pretty obvious listening to the end result, but my music is iterations on iterations on iterations. thats not unusual, and potentially not very interesting either.. but lets see anyway. i keep a pretty good record of the way songs mutate as i work on them. my creative process with music is very much, um, every couple of days throw some new shit at the wall, and eventually you end up with a wall covered in shit, and hopefully it sticks and starts to smell rosy. often its just shit.
ANYWAY over the next couple of weeks i’m going to post up five different versions of my inquiet remix, starting with the results of my very first sit-down with the project, and then ending with a “finished product”… as finished as anything i do ever is (here’s a hint: it never is). not to say that i’m the wizard of oz, but this does feel a bit like opening the curtain and letting you see my hideous inner workings - its not necessarily pretty but maybe someone will appreciate it. it might be interesting to track where the different parts of the song move in each iteration, hear some of the differences in the mixing and arrangement as the track changes, and get a bit of an idea of how i work. that is, if you are a massive nerd.
ok. so, lets start with - version 1: september 25, 2008, which is about a month ago. i’ve been listening to sam’s record for a couple of weeks since its release and getting really excited about wanting to play with some parts. so i sit down for a couple of hours, record some guitar, dig out some parts from an old bread track, and this comes together. also in the mix at this point - a fleetwood mac drum machine, and some ethereal sounds from thin lizzy (you’d never pick either sample, its fair to say)…
this works best if you play it at 4am and put scary ambient music on in the background
note to self: don’t send copy of new faux pas album to the age.
“son, we don’t take kindly to your folk around here…. jimmy, pass me the new kings of leon”
the negative review of qua’s new record that appeared in last friday’s age is an absolute shocker: dismissing one of melbourne’s more humble and unassuming musicians as a “3065-postcode hipster“; equating his virtuosic production and composition to that of a “14-year old kid with a Mac“; and more or less saying that his album sucks because it doesn’t sound like Air or Daft Punk.
this is probably the kind of thing that should just be left alone - perhaps it’d be best for this review to simply be something for cornel (qua) and his mates to chuckle about, and then move on and forgetabout it. and don’t get me wrong i like critical reviews, even of my favourite records. but they have to be a lot more thoughtful than this.
the thing is, for me, this review is symptomatic of the australian mainstream music media’s lack of respect for music that actually pushes the boundaries a little. i used to think it was a bad thing that most of the country’s more interesting music gets ignored by the mainstream music press - now i’m beginning to wonder whether its better to be ignored. note to music editors: if your reviewers don’t understand “electronic music”, and if this is how you’re going to write-up one of the more respected electronic producers in the country - then please just leave it well enough alone. we can continue to play amongst ourselves and you guys can keep lauding the fashionable haircut rockers, shallow synth-pop combos, and heartbroken singer-songwriters.
what worries me most is that this might be the first time many age readers have heard of qua - and its a horrible and completely out-of-line (if mercifully brief) representation of him and his music. make your own mind up about qua at http://myspace.com/quamusic
the review can be read over at the to and fro blog, where you can also read an elegant dressing down of the review from my radio cohort dave, along with (more of!) my two cents.
and yes, these are just the personal rants of a couple of emotionally invested dudes who want to stick up for a guy whose music they like. we’re just mouthing off, but hey, thats what blogs are for. perhaps next time a reviewer decides to write a review that basically amounts to a not-so-thinly veiled attack on a kind of music they simply don’t like, they should consider blogging about it instead. we expect more considered responses from professionals.