Indiecater: The Return

Tweet Unlike Cocoon: The Return, which was a flaccid snorefest about aliens and the lubed up sex-lives of sprightly American pensioners, Indiecater: The Return (AKA Indiecater: Volume 2) is a fantastic new MP3 album available from the mighty MP3Hugger. He's a man who is as fond of quality new indie music as he is of corny puns. The concept is the same as the first Indiecater. It is a super affordable album of gleaming musical treasures picked out by the 'Hugger's magpie eye. Best of all, the artists see the money from this, so you're effectively buying them a fraction of their next pint/bag of sweets/wrap of ketamine/present for their lover. The album cover artwork is illustrated by Laura DeBurca, who does a mean line in drawing runners. In a weird confluence of people in my life, the guy who provides track one of this compilation (Montag) is going out with an old friend of mine from when I lived in Canada nine years ago. Out of millions eh? Either the world is getting smaller or us indie-heads live in a tiny cloistered global community. I suspect the latter. Instead of a music MP3, here are chapters 1 and 2 of Moby Dick. There's a new book out now called 'Leviathan' by a writer called Philip Hoare. He is obsessed with whales, and by extension, with Moby Dick. Apart from being a parable about man's doomed thirst for revenge and domination (which I appreciate but can't understand 'cos I don't thirst for revenge and domination) Moby Dick is also about unfathomable mysteries. The whale itself is a shadowy enchanted thing that could be anywhere in all the seven seas at any one time; from the frozen Arctic to the sunny Azores. Now that is something I can both appreciate and understand because I have a thirst for unfathomable mysteries (this time last year, the header above was inspired by me thinking drunkenly about icebergs and whales). So, instead of listening to a tune today, try out the first coupla chapters of a book that is as deep as our own minds. MP3: Moby Dick-Chapter 1 and 2.

good fortune

Tweet As I said below, I lost my laptop recently and this is the reason my more recent blogs were about as frequent and illuminating as solar eclipses. Yesterday I managed to get my laptop back. Talk about good fortune. A taxi driver called me and said he had it (he found my number on a document in the bag containing it). I feel a bit fortunate. This is actually the second time I lost my laptop and a pile of other important shit and retreived it. Actually, maybe I am not fortunate. Maybe, taxi drivers are just generally very honest dudes. MP3 time. Mercury Rev, it would seem, are going nicely weird on us all over again. The last album, the Secret Migration, was an odd thing altogether. It had a cover picture that looked like one of those "thanks for the add" butterflies you get off random 45 year old women from Florida on myspace. The music itself was a wafer-thin, whimsical pastoral psychedelia of the type Tangerine Dream got into late in their career. It was a menagerie of unicorns, butterflies and nymphs set to over produced faerie music. It left many fans cold. It gave me the heebie jeebies. I can't listen to it without my mind's eye picturing Jonothan Donohoe's sinister Nosferatu frame jumping Enya-like into a water colour painting and skipping through a rippling, badly animated video of all the wishy washy, new age shit mentioned above. Donohoe works best when he is hiding in corners full of lengthening shadows and spidery things. That is because he is a spidery thing that casts a lengthening shadow himself. Thanx 4 the add!! Luv Jonothan and Grasshopper xxxx MP3: Mercury Rev-Senses on Fire If you jumped ship after that album, new MP3 'senses on fire' suggests it might be time to get back on board. Of course, they will never again be the bonkers human chaos receptacles they were back in the Dave Baker days (big blog coming I promise), but this promo track is well worth a listen. It has a forceful forward momentum and even though the production gleams like ceramic, the electronic building crescendos give it a vibrancy and sense of 'realness' that, for me, was sorely lacking from 'The Secret Migration'. I am very much looking forward to the new stuff, a concurrently released set of albums called 'Snowflake Midnight' and 'Strange Attractor'. The cover of 'Snowflake Midnight' is a very pagan looking rabbit or hare giving you the psycho eye, which bodes well. Rabbits and Hares/ Give me scares/ Their Jupiter eyes/ Under Catskill Skies....(cue warbly saw solo and alien female vocal) My inner Mercury Rev lyric generator tells me there is a 70% chance the above lyric will feature on the new ablum. If it doesn't, Jonathan Donohoe can buy it off me for 90c. Bring on the Rev!

Technological blips

Tweet According to people here and here, the mighty Times New Viking are returning to Ireland on the 17th of October. Good news for people who love noisy news. It will be part of a Drowned in Sound thing, called 'shred your face off with machine gun shards of noise you pussies!' or something to that effect. Madly, No Age and Los! Campesinos are on the same bill and it will be less than sixteen quid. I'm intrigued to find out in what order the bands are playing? I mean if Los! Campesinos have to follow either of those two bands up, their fey xylophone jingles will need to penetrate a lot of gloppy wax and ear bloodfarts to make any sort of impact, surely? Still, it is only delightful news on the gig front altogether. Tonight, I wanted to write about a few things I don't like, the yin to the last blog's yang. All I can think of at the moment is Jeremy Clarkson, and he just makes me feel weary and depressed. There is no point in slagging such a smug totem of inhumanity. So fuck that shit. Also, I lost my laptop. Every time I press a key on this hunk of Toshiba junk (my lovely sister`s), the click is a grim reminder of what an absent-minded dolt I can be sometimes. I'd crawl over broken glass and gnaw Jeremy Clarkson's toenails off his feet (while he chastises me for being Irish) to get my old laptop back. On second thoughts, not Clarkson's toenails, maybe Julian who does the Corrie links on UTV, his toenails? I dunno, I just want my fucking laptop back. I can see it now, face down in the Liffey, covered in geen slime and crustaceans, blinking its last feeble blips of life into the murk, and gurgling a distorted grandaddy ditty to itself. Because it was a Mac, I like to think it had a little heart like ET had. Good-bye my little friend. You served me well. I'm probably obsessing over it too much cos my girlfriend's in New York. I miss her loads too. But its nice and russet outside so I'll go for a walk before the floods come again. I don't have any MP3s to post unless you want to hear a Toshiba jingle. Instead, for a forceful slap in the face of sheer what-the-fuckery check this out for size. Glenn Campbell singing that stupid flipping Greenday nursery rhyme on his Myspace. Fuck the floods, this means the world is now officially coming to an end. Glenn, God love him, wrote few of the songs he is famous for singing, but surely his voice was meant for greater things than this?

a few thingies I like right now.

Tweet 1: Lego Indiana Jones on Nintendo DS: It is very simple to complete, but the real attraction of this game is when you get to build stuff out of lego. The lego click-clacks together in such a satisfyingly tangible way that I will continue to play it even though I bet all the levels. Pure childish escapism. 2: This is a Librivox recording: There is an American archive of lots of old books which are in the public domain. I downloaded the entire novel of Moby Dick. It's just magic to travel from Kells to Dublin and listen sleepily to an American man reading one of the great American novels to you. I love Moby Dick, and I particularly love getting it read to me for free. Librivox. 3: The Wire: Everyone taks about it, yet nobody watches it. Pull your fingers out world. It is the singlemost thrilling and astonishingly great TV show of all time. 4: Krautrock: Neu!, Amon Duul II, Faust, Kraftwerk. It is a wonderful, bizarre and under-appreciated scene in the history of Western rock. WIG OUT YOU CRAYZEEEE GERMAN BASTARDS. That's it for now. I have to interview Jonathan from Mercury Rev tomorrow and I am really at a loss about what to ask him. Ideas will be welcome and really appreciated below.

sprouts...

Tweet In her weekly column Lost in Showbiz, Guardian journalist Marina Hyde's running joke is that the apocalypse is nigh. She knows this because the outrageous antics of self-regarding celebrities which obsess us so (and which she skewers with hilarious venom) are the harbingers of the End Times. The celeb-ocalypse if you will. Last night, Mikey, the blind Scottish guy in Big Brother, brought Marina's apocalypse a step closer. In the spirit of the show, a challenge was devised where housemates had to humiliate themselves in order to win a fag or a teabag or something. This particular challenge was to eat 300 Brussels sprouts in a set time period. Mikey devised a strategy which consisted of chewing them into a mulchy paste, spitting them back into a bucket of tea, then eating them again. I've seen fucked up gory shit in horror movies, but nothing to beat this. Channel 4 treated us to close-ups of stringy, regurgitated vegetable fronds hanging from his lip. The camera zoomed in mercilessly as rivulets of cold tea, saliva and sprout juice ran off his grinding jaw. At the end of the task he tipped the resulting unutterable mess all over his head. Why would you do that? Why? Why would a 33 year-old man cover himself in his own semi-masticated gunge? In Italy, extreme Catholics flagellate themselves into a bloody pulp every seven years as part of an archaic form of worship. Mikey's humiliation seemed just as fucked up to me, a debasing act against the self driven by a faulty belief system, in this case the worship of fame for fame's sake. It is unfortunately ironic that Mikey is sightless, because what he shares with everyone else in that house is a blind devotion to fame. Few of them will ever be happy. The life cycle of a post Big Brother contestant would appear to be shorter than that of a mayfly, and as existentially absurd as a short Kafka story. It's a fucked up merry-go-round with the gears jammed on accelerate, a blur of column inches, grotesque London nite clubs, bulimia, tit magazines, suicide bids and ultimately the worst fate of all for an attention seeker, an excruciatingly lonely celebrity entropy, a drying up of magazine offers, a dimming of flashbulbs. A long, hollow, faded night of the soul, where your 'agent' (silver-haired cockney cokehound with a tattered filofax full of defunct phone numbers from the late '90s and a handshake that feels like an encounter with a dead squid) decides the offer to open a newsagent in Newry wasn't so bad after all. Such a shame Kemal got in there first. Hi my name is Kinga. I inserted an empty wine bottle into my vagina on live TV for my proverbial '15 minutes'. I think the Pet Shop Boys were very prescient because they managed to write a song about me and others like me 15 years ago. However, the lyrics of said song are tinged with one small, sad inaccuracy. Unlike, say, Jordan, we're not "harder than you'll ever guess". We're insecure, unstable, easily used, and sometimes severely mentally ill. MP3: The Pet Shop Boys-Shameless Tomorrow: an upbeat blog. I promise.

Analogue-YAY!

Tweet UPDATE: ANALOGUE LAUNCH PARTY THIS FRIDAY IN TRIPOD AT 10PM. CH-CH-CHECK THE FLYER BELOW.



The brand spanky new issue of Analogue is out all over the place today. Grab 'em while you can kids. Where earlier issues were interview heavy, this issue contains a lot more in the way of meaty features. So while you'll find interviews with the likes of Stephen Malkmus and Times New Viking, you will also find features on 8-Bit music, musical subcultures and a trip to the Sonar festival. Best of all, the magazine now has a more national distribution and can be picked up in Kilkenny, Galway and Cork. Certain issues have a free CD by storkboy choons and colours move. Well worth checking out.



A PDF of the entire magazine can be found here