Nonwrestler Blog

RIP Teo Macero

Always feel a bit weird about grief for public figures and stuff, but not sure if this guy's death will make that much of a ripple, but also think he's worth knowing about if you're into music. He died on the 19th, aged 82.

I first heard about Teo Macero through the movie Modulations, where he talks about how as early as the 60s he was hacking and splicing the tapes for jazz musicians like Miles Davis, completely blowing apart any purist notions of jazz being something that only happens in real time, and jazz records being real records of an event / performance. For someone who loves production and edits and mixing, it was pretty exciting to learn that that aspect was being totally pushed and developed at the same time that Davis was going electric and giving birth to fusion.

Wikipedia entry
The text of the Modulations interview

Here's an interview about his work on Bitches Brew. Not sure there're any particular insights here, but his impersonations of Davis are pretty classic. :)

Labels: music

Posted at 8:56 AM  0 Comments Links to this post

CD reviews catch-up

I was trying to make last.fm journal entries about CDs I'd bought, but ran out somewhere around the time I left Japan. So here's what I just spurted out...


Jodi Cave - Carbon Series Volume 4 (12x50, 2006)


Lukid - Onandon (Tirk, 2007)


Take - Earthtones & Concrete (Inner Current Recordings, 2007)


LisM - Reverso (Disques Corde, 2007)


Various - Microsolutions #1: Microsolutions To Megaproblems (Soul Jazz Records, 2005)


Over The Atlantic - Junica (Involve, 2006)


Fennesz - +47° 56' 37" -16° 51' 08" (Touch, 1999)


Taylor Deupree & Christopher Willits - Deupree + Willits / Invisible Architecture #8 / Whatever this is! (Audiosphere, 2003)


Sun - I'll Be The Same (Preservation, 2007)

Labels: music

Posted at 9:52 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Paramodel: Graffiti-style Rail Track Art

Pretty impressive stuff, I reckon.



Paramodel: Graffiti-style Rail Track Art

Labels: misc time-wasting

Posted at 12:41 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

What's changed in Wellington

So, having been living outside New Zealand for 6 years, I was prepared for a bit of reverse culture shock coming back from Japan. When Amanda and I were blogging about our time in Tokyo people seemed to dig the reports on the little things that were different (others just wanted photos). So here's the local version - some of the stuff I've noticed about my hometown that may or may not have changed since 2001.

1. Massive increase in Kiwiana and NZ-themed t-shirts

Every time I leave the house I see someone wearing a t-shirt that has some emblem of New Zealand-ness on it. The most popular by a (country) mile is a map of NZ made up of tesselating shapes. The simple slogans "Born here" and "Home" seem popular among a raft of very clear statements of patriotism. Similar positive references to local areas are also pretty ubiquitious, including plenty about Newtown (a suburb of Wellington). Kitsch items of Kiwiana were pretty popular before I left, but a set of Kiwi emblems seems to have been established that crop up in every design shop. I'm thinking photos of baby fern fronds, pohutakawa blossoms, and windswept beaches with tussock on dunes. Silhouettes of koru, wetas, tikis and any of the native birds.
It's a funny one, I'm not sure how I feel about it all. I'm pretty distrusting of patriotic sentiments, but on the flipside the ubiquity of this stuff extends to most of my closest friends - and I'm pretty trusting of them. ;) Getting over our cultural cringe seems like a great thing. Being comfortable with where you are from, or where you are seems ace, but I get nervous about what happens next when that develops into pride. I guess Australia and Japan are both quite good places for instilling nerves on this topic... that "Born here" slogan might look pretty nasty in Australia, where 25% of the population isn't.

2. "I see fat people"

This was something I was expecting, really, but it's not the obese people that shocked me, just the general wobbliness of the population as a whole. Food portions seem almost offensively large, from ginormous coffees through heaped plates of noodles to every dessert being much more than I want. I remember the culture shock going to the States as a teenager and this is a very similar feeling. I can't help but feel it's a bad thing, that however healthy our diets get New Zealanders are just eating absolute shit-loads of food. Coming back in time for Christmas was not good if I was hoping to slowly adjust. ;)

3. Vege options = Cheese.

I went into a sandwich bar and they had 3 different vege options: one with brie, one with blue cheese, and one with something like gouda. Doesn't sit well with the above point about freaking out over fat. Seems like cheese is so often used as the defining feature of vege dishes, which is a massive contrast to Japan. Mind you, having three vege options in a sandwich bar is three more vege dishes than you'd get in many Japanese eateries. However it does seem like the number of options in Wellington has increased in the past however long, too. The average cafe will have vege, vegan, gluten free and whatever else dishes available and if not the staff are generally primed to provide options on request.

4. "Heat pumps"

OK, it's a small thing, but Japanese-made heat pumps have become popular things for Wellington houses. I'd never heard of a heat pump before, and certainly never seen one in Wellington, but soon found out all about them on the open home circuit. They're a relatively energy-efficient way to heat your house and fight the ubiquitous damp, by sucking in air from outside and heating it along the way. They looked strangely familiar to me, and it's because in Japan these exact same things are called air conditioners (well, "eerukon", to be more precise). They're advertised as an energy-efficient way to cool your house and fight the ubiquitous damp, by sucking in air from outside and cooling it along the way. Of course the things both cool and heat, but it just made me laugh that there was this funny new technology I'd never heard of, which turned out to be something I'd become so familiar with in Japan.

5. Tattoos

As with fatness, I expected that the omnipresence of tattoos was going to be a little odd after Japan, where the yakuza associations may be waning, but tattoos are not something most of the population would even consider. I have tattoos myself, so I'm not anti them in principle, but I must be honest I've been a bit appalled by the sheer volume of near-identical, surely-that-can't-hold-personal-importance type tats. Probably going to the gym doesn't help in that regard, because there's a neat correlation between the guys there who are trying to make their torsos into giant triangles and those who are covered in generic tats.

6. trademe

Like rugby, New Zealand's answer to EBay has fully entered the culture. You might hate it, might be indifferent, might love it to bits, but you know about it and have some opinion. Seems ridiculously popular and busy. I've found it pretty useful so far, but haven't got anything like hooked. I spend my "gah, bargain!" energy on that MP3 shop I wrote about in my last post.

Labels: life

Posted at 10:01 PM  5 Comments Links to this post

Going nuts MP3 shopping

I stumbled upon an MP3 shopping site called Amie St , which works on the premise that songs are initially free and increase in price as demand goes up, i.e. as more people download. Alongside that when customers sign up with some credit they also get "RECs", so they can tag a song as one they recommend and write a little blurb about why they like it. If the price goes up they get additional credit. So basically it's encouraging customer-driven promotion and customers to check out unknown stuff.

Intrigued, I had a chat with Shanan and we agreed to put our Montano album up there. It's kinda stalled after slipping over the threshold into pay-per-download, which seems to be the case for most any unknown material out there. So am not sure about the artist side of it being so beneficial for complete unknowns. For that matter I don't think there's any electronica that's actually making returns, beyond some Ninja Tune crap, but I may be wrong.

Still, on the customer side of it I'm totally hooked. Having got the cable modem set up at home I've got the latest downloads page as my home page and keep checking in to see what I can grab while it's still dirt cheap. I've downloaded a lot of stuff that I've quite liked but never been so moved as to buy at full price in the past, a few things I would've bought on sight at full price, and a bunch of cool things I'd never heard of before. Plus some absolute horse shit. :)

Highlights:

• Antiguo Automata Mexicano's Kraut Slut for free. Have to update my best of 2007 list, this is absolutely superb micro-house / ambient-techno / modifier-noun stuff from Mexico (duh)
  
• Mudd's Claremont 56 for free. As above, absolutely superb 2007 release, this time in the realms of ballearic / beard disco / whatever. Strange mix of slow motion disco, blistering guitar solos and whatever else. Hm. Suits the sunny weather.
  
• Ridiculous amounts of Big Dada's back catalogue, including every Roots Manuva album, every TTC album, both Ty albums, and something from Company Flow's Bigg Jus, all for free.
  
• Completed my Dabrye collection, with his first album and the 12" with the Prefuse 73 remix for free. Dunno why I thought this stuff wasn't worth picking up, it's almost as good as Instrmntl.
  
• Lots of other Ghostly International / Spectral Sound 12"s that I wouldn't bother to buy on vinyl, but which often have a couple of great tunes on them.
  
• J Dilla's Ruff Draft for US$8. Lots more Stones Throw stuff there, but I already have the ones I wanted to get. Keep vacillating over getting Aloe Blacc's album.
  
• A huge Roedelius retrospective for free, going back to Kluster, Cluster, his collabs with Brian Eno and whatever else. Some of it even sounds good.
  

There're lots of things I don't like about how the site works, but it's suckered me. Kind of like watching Lost, I s'pose. ;) Plus they've just published me waxing lyrical about DJ Vadim for extra credit, so I guess I'm on the payroll now. ;)

It's funny, this has curbed my illegal downloading a fair amount.

Labels: misc time-wasting, music

Posted at 11:55 AM  1 Comments Links to this post

I find this far more funny than I ought to.

Some smart-arse has overdubbed the sound on a bunch of guitar gods... They go on far too long, but funny idea. Here are a couple of faves.

Santana shreds! Love the band...



Jake E Lee shreds! Ozzy Osbourne looks ... very talented.

Labels: youtube

Posted at 10:43 AM  0 Comments Links to this post