in gravyland

Nick Cave on Brighton

I feel very connected to the area, very much a part of it,” he muses. “I have a strange sense of belonging which I’ve never really felt since I left Australia - in fact, I never really felt it in Australia. Walking along I have found that I have these weird feelings, feelings I’ve never really had before, of a real love towards the place. I’m here for the duration. The duration of my life.

Nick Cave talking about Brighton, from an exclusive interview by Bella Todd, in Brighton and Hove’s The Argus newspaper.

Green Man: Sunday morning

About 8 I climbed out of bed and went in search of a toilet. And it was a classic morning. Low grey mist hanging over everything. A couple of hours later it has all burned off leaving warm sun and a blue sky. My early morning wellies exchanged for sandals and a bowl of cereal and I’m out here waiting for the music to start.

A few “infrastructure” problems showed up starting last night. Seems like there was a bit of a water shortage and a bunch of toilets were closed at bedtime, making for that uneasy feeling that it might all go terribly wrong. But this morning seems like it is all pretty much up and running again, though I still haven’t mamanged to find a working shower. (Yesterday’s ’shower’ was more like a cold, dripping tap).

Yesterday afternoon - - spent most of it hanging around the Puppets a go Go tend with the friends and caught a little bit of music at the Folkey Dokey stage inside the Baskerville Hall. The best there was Andrew Hockey. He was kindof shy and self effacing like Ed Kuepper, but when he was singing and playing guitar it was deep and heartful.

Really missed seeing anything on the main stage last night. We were having a quite a party at Adam and Rachael’s campsite, then I took Bea back to the tent and ended up staying there myself. I better go and see some of the good stuff today.

It has just gone eleven and the music has started up. I’m off to have a look.

At Green Man 2005

Well here I am “live” blogging from the Green Man Festival, via a convenient free wifi network coming from the Baskerville Hall Hotel. Thanks…

The festival started proper last night (Friday) and after spending a long dat helping our mates get their marquee up, we got to see some of the opening folk acts on the main stage. Early on, I really loved Brigyn who suffered through some sound problems to deliver some beautiful melodic music. Welsh sounds really good sung. I guess that is no surprise really.

Now it is about noon: the puppet tent is opening and the main stage has cranked up. Time to get out into it and see and hear some things.

There are a couple of darkish clouds hanging around but no rain yet. There was a quick shower last night that sent us scurrying back to the tent for wellies and raincoats. By the time we got the gear on, though, the rain was gone.

The countryside around here is beautiful. Staring off into the distance is a delight. The far side of the valley bathed in shafts of sunlight is just stunning.

Green Man Cometh

Geez we’ve been travelling for a long time. It is starting to set in now, with less than a month left. Things are starting to speed up as we head towards the last few stops… Paris, Hong Kong and then back to Perth.

But first, a festival and a few more days messing around in the UK and a buddhist family retreat.

Tomorrow we depart for the grounds of Baskerville Hall for the Green Man Festival. Looking interesting. See the dude with the horns above? He is some kind of logo. It is a new folk festival, small, about 1000 people only. The weather is looking ok, and we do have wellington boots.

glastonbury

We head off to the glastonbury festival today until Sunday. I’ll send in photos and reports from the mobile as we go.

iPods

Here’s a post all about iPods. Feel free to skip it :-)

We’ve got two iPods: Lib has a 3rd generation ‘big’ iPod and I have an iPod shuffle.

I find the 3rd generation iPod a bit hard to navigate, and not very responsive to key presses. It is slow enough to be annoying and I find it too heavy to take a lot of places. That’s why I bought myself a 512M Shuffle.

The shuffle is great. It works pretty much perfectly for my walk to and from work.

But more and more it is full of fairy stories and Tigger songs, as my daughter Bea really likes to be able to listen to her stuff, and I’m really happy to give her the shuffle because it is simple to work, she loves it, it is light and hard to break. By now, the neck cord on the shuffle is looking pretty dirty and the whol package is a bit less apple-worship pristine, if you know what I mean.

I’d love to fall in love with 3G iPod, but that isn’t going to happen. Too big, too heavy, too fragile.

I want my own iPod Mini. Oh bugger, Apple have got me again.

Is 512MB enough to shuffle?

As I said back there, I ordered up an 512MB iPod shuffle the morning after the announcement, caught up in the excitement of it all. I’d been looking for some simple mp3 player to take me from home to work and back again on foot or on the cat bus and nothing was going to be sufficiently easy to work with until the shuffle came along.

Now, the shipping date is listed as 27 January, a couple of weeks away still. And I’m curious: what does 512MB randomly shuffled feel like?

To try it out I made a smart playlist in iTunes limited to 512MB selected randomly from all the songs in iTunes with a rating of more than 1 star. This means it picks up everything that I’v bothered to rate as 2 stars or greater in iTunes. I went through my library and rated a whole lot more songs till I’d found 512MB worth.

And then turn on shuffle and set it to play. About one in five songs I intervene and go forward a track because I’m not in the mood. Apart from that, I leave it alone.

The result is rather good. There’s enough randomness to make it interesting, but not too much. I think 512MB is going to be good.

It seems like I have some sort of back-of-brain familiarity with all 91 songs in the playlist. I don’t know much about how our brains deal with groups of 90 or 100 things but not 2,500 (my full iTunes Library). I’ll have a look in the Mind Hacks book (thanks Phil, great present) and see if they have anything to say about this.

Womadelaide 2005: March 4-6 2005

Last year we had a great time at Womadelaide.

They’ve just announced some of the lineup for next years show, still on at the Botanic Park in Adelaide, from March 4th to 6th 2005.

We’ll be there. Who’s coming?

Update: Here are my posts from Womadelaide last year.

Have a deLuxe Spring

My multi-talented and amazing partner Libby is guest DJ at Luxe Bar this Wednesday night.

Here’s what she says about the gig:

Come and celebrate the spring vibe…

I’m going to be a DJ for goodness sake, at the luscious Luxe bar, 446 Beaufort Street, Mount Lawley this Wednesday [29th Sept] (tomorrow eve) at 8pm.

Here’s a taste of some of the loving, grooving tunefuls and daggy hits that will be played for your wiggling pleasure.

Unashamedly fun and eclectic…

Crazy Penis
Michael Franti & Spearhead
The Cat Empire
Queen
Blur
Rolling Stones
Missy Elliott
Adam Ant
Basement Jaxx
Abba
ZZ Top
Faithless
Deeelite
Kruder & Dorfneister
Adbulah Ibrahim
Jimmy Little
Sweet Honey On The Rock
Iggy Pop
Velvet Underground
Edwin Collins
Backyard Dog
Grace Jones
KC & Sunshine
Salt n Peppa
OutKast
Tone Loc
The Strokes
Air
Bea Bea Primrose
Bjork
The Soggy Bottom Boys
The Police
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
The Strokes

Special prizes for:

the best air guitar or lip-synching/hairbrush wielding rendition of your favourite song

Plus a chance to (re)learn how to wiggle with a hula hoop to one of the classic hula hooping songs of this century (alright alright alright alright)

Yes it’s a mid-week thing and very late notice but really, don’t we always need more music and fun in our lives? Especially the parental units out there. Go on… Call up a dancing buddy and get on up - or just meet Gra and I (and maybe even Miss Bea) and a few others for a cocktail (or milkeshake in her case). Lifts home available for some of the Southern folk at various points during the evening.

Requests in advance welcome, or bring it along on CD or vinyl

With love and wiggles

Libby

So come along!!!! Hope to see you there.

Opera Revue, Friday 15th October

Our cool friends at Daisy Productions present…
 
The Opera Revue 

Peter Knapp (Bass baritone/ Presenter)
Sarah Sweeting (Mezzo soprano),
Tomasso Pollio (piano) and special guest
Penny Shaw (soprano).
 
“An evening of sheer delight!” The Evening Standard, London
 
Peter Knapp, opera singer, director and raconteur, invites you into his wonderful world of opera. Laugh at how it really is: the divas, the dramas and the unforeseen disasters. Listen to the loveliest singing as he joins with Prima Donna and pianist to bring you a sumptuous selection of operatic tunes. Look out as Carmen herself mingles amongst you and you find yourself being trained to join in an operatic chorus!
 
Peter Knapp trained in Italy and has sung all over the world. He bases the Revue on his many hilarious operatic experiences and in fact the idea for such a show first came to him whilst swinging from a chandelier as Don Giovanni.
 
“Peter Knapp is not only a fabulous singer, he is also a very funny man.” The Times, London
 
Dress Circle Bar, His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth
 
Friday 15th October, 7.30pm
 
Tickets $30 from BOCS ticketing 9484 1133

The Rest of Womadelaide

Well, we had another cracking day at Womadelaide on Sunday then, tired bunnies that we were, made our way home on Sunday night. The trouble with these weekend festivals is that just when you are getting used to being there every day, it is time to go home. Well, it was wonderful to pick up our little girl and head home for a nice long sleep.

Cat Empire played again on Sunday, this time on the main stage. We got ourselves a couple of rows back from the front and enjoyed the experience from there. Such good musicians and so humbly competent as well. Abdullah Ibrahim then played another beautiful set and after that we just wandered through the rest of the day until it was time to find a taxi and head for the airport.

All in all, it was an amazing weekend and I’m planning on getting to the next one or maybe one of the other Womad festivals worldwide.

Popeyed

These two guys were doing a great roving acrobatic balancing act with a lot of humour and funny expressions. Turns out they are coming to the Fremantle Buskers Festival. Lib managed to get their autograph as well.

(You can click on the images to get a closer look).

Following the stream: LynnFox to FC/Kahuna to Lake of Bass

Sometimes it is really nice to follow the stream through vision and music, and discover some new stuff.

Xeni at Boing Boing noticed LynnFox’s video for FC/Kahuna’s song Hayling. Now, Hayling is a hauntingly beautiful track, and LynnFox’s ethereal underwater digital animated sea creatures are spellbinding. But the streaming music quality just wasn’t there, so popped down to the local record shop: Mills Records.

There I found the FC/Kahuna album Machine Says Yes. I like. I like a lot.

And best of all, chatting to Tim down there at Mills, I rediscovered old favourites Lake Of Bass (which he is a part of), and their recent album Wildlife Researcher. I love their earlier EP Deep Dark Jazz, and this new one is deeper, darker, smoother and lovelier all around. Go buy this one, ok.

“Sounds Like Techno”

Here is an informative and enjoyable history of Techno. It is a really beautiful interactive flash presentation full of music, interviews and smoov graphics. Have a look. Most enjoyable way to spend half an hour or so.

Discovered via Xeni & Frank

Billy Bragg

Just home from seeing Billy Bragg and the Blokes.

He’s got it so right.

He supports Democratic Socialism, he says, because you can’t talk about Socialism any more without spending a whole lots of words saying that it doesn’t have to be totalitarian or Stalin. And, we need a society with Compassion as a core value. Things like that.

And he gave us a lot, a long set, a lot of good song and humour. Nice to come away uplifted.

Michael Franti and Spearhead

Just back from seeing Michael Franti and Spearhead live. What can I say. Wonderful, warm, beautiful music. Great crowd. More please.

A revolution from the middle

Apple have pulled off something quite extraordinary with their new new Music Store.

It is a revolution from the middle. A nice solution of a supposedly impossible problem. A deal struck with the people you don’t do deals with. A bridge somewhere between peer-to-peer file-sharing and buying CDs in a shop. And executed with style.

They’ve put an implementation of digital rights management (DRM) for music out into the world that actually seems reasonable and usable in the opinion of many. Combine this with some technological innovation (new AAC high-quality codec, new iPod) and the usual nice Apple design, and you have an online music service that people will actually buy from. (It looks good, the price is right, it is easy to use, and the new IPod is cool.

How did Apple do this? The managed to make a deal with the 5 major labels. That in itself is an amazing achievement, and may have been something that only Apple, among the computer or content companies, could have done.

Key reason why the labels have gone with Apple might be:
- they know what they are doing technologically
- they can make things that look good
- the store only works on Apple, restricted to users of 5% of the PC market. This would allow the DRM to be tested in a smaller environment before it is unleashed on the whole world. Imagine if a problem was found in the security of the DRM system and all songs worldwide were suddenly able to be DRM free? The labels might be slightly scared of such a potential failure.
- they control enough of the target gear to make DRM work (computers, software, iPods)…

This last point is key. If there are any hassles or dissatisfaction from the major labels, I can imagine that the Windows port of iTunes 4 might take ‘longer than expected.

The price per song seems a little high. I’d love to see it around the US$0.50 mark, which would seem like a bargain. It might get to that later.

Having said all this, I haven’t bought anything yet. I don’t have a US credit card.

Have a look at the webcast of the launch. This is classic Jobs. He sures know how to put on a show.