Petronia

Yeah so I haven't updated these since I went to Shanghai, bawling. I kept the tracklistings though... well, since December. November's a bit of a loss.


January 4, 2011 [direct link]
( Lisa Nilsson, Gorillaz, Terror Danjah, Rox, I Blame Coco, Utada Hikaru, Saint Etienne )

I still prefer the Matsuda Seiko version of "Who's That Boy" - English enunciation aside, she owns the sentiment of the song while the heartfelt belter is more Lisa Nilsson's thing - but hey, I found the original version! Did you guys even know there was an original version!

BROADCAST REGULATION CANADIAN CONTENT PROTIPS: any and all covers of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" count as CanCon. Similarly, if Damon Albarn makes a track on his iPad in a Montreal or Vancouver hotel room after a gig, this also counts as CanCon.

*~*~*

January 11, 2011 [direct link]
( Cold Fairyland, jj, Owen Pallett, David Bowie, Akufen, Isolée, Ikonika )

I was at Igloofest Friday and Saturday night in -30C weather, dancing until my legs dropped off in order to beat hypothermia. It was awesome! Missed Terror Danjah night due to work, but Egyptrixx and Weatherall** turned out impressive sets and ginger monster Hatchmatik completely blew up the igloo tent. One imagines dude must have LOLed for like an hour when he dug up a track that transitions seamlessly into "One More Time" without giving the game away. UNTIL THE SYNTHS HIT

Going back next week for Detroit night and Ikonika. Please disregard anything I said about Ikonika in the podcast, apparently I'm incapable of not sounding like an idiot.

*~*~*

January 18, 2011 [direct link]
( jj, Broadcast, The Ian Fays, Crystal Castles feat. Robert Smith, Kylie Minogue, Gorillaz, Saint Etienne, Korallreven, Hamasaki Ayumi )

Geebus I have played that dumbass song about Ecstasy thirty buttzillion times. This album has a giant marijuana leaf on the cover, so classy.



** One of the unsung pleasures of Igloofest is clocking DJs in winter gear. XD As Sam put it no one is really going to buy a parka for a single gig, so chances are you're getting real-life dorkiness and/or stylishness and/or Scandinavian daily-lifeness or what have you. Weatherall showed up in this impressive fur collar number, having remarked in interview beforehand that the upside of winter was being able to dress appropriately i.e. in tweed. "Heat is the enemy of style!" /LOL SCOTS

102.3FM Radio Centre-Ville Chinese-language music show: Special of the Day (Tu 10:30-11:30PM)

Episode 2: February 2 - Tribute to Lhasa De Sela and Kate McGarrigle
[I go first this time! starts 4 minutes in]
right click to download

( tracklisting )

( my Kate McGarrigle and Rufus Wainwright anecdote; not quite a translation )

That was a morbid episode, the theme was DEATH. Next week will be DAMON ALBARN'S CHINESE NEW YEAR. orz

DJ Dave presents Zoukompa 2009

On the 2nd I went to a concert (a ball, really, held in a banquet hall in Anjou) with a couple of guys who're active in the Haitian cultural community; radio work etc. The link above is a promo mix one of them made of the year's popular tunes: zouk is French West Indies party music, kompa is I guess to Haiti what bossa nova is to Brazil. Montreal has one of the largest Haitian diaspora communities in North America - enough to put on gigs like this, hosting popular bands on tour outside Haiti - but I haven't really known anyone Haitian since high school. In twenty years I hadn't gotten off once at Henri-Bourassa metro station, where we'd arranged to meet. I've never been anywhere in the Caribbean, either. I was going to blog about it afterward, when I found the time, but you know how it is.

If there had been no earthquake, and I'd gotten around to it, this would've been burbling as per usual: how griot and red bean rice are awesome when you suddenly find yourself ravenous in the middle of the night (even if the rice tasted oddly soytastic like what I imagine a Chinese restaurant in Port-Au-Prince would serve up), how I was told you need at least eight good players to make a kompa band so it's hard to keep an amateur group together for any length of time, how Creole is incomprehensible even if it sounds like one ought to be able to understand it, like Cantonese or Korean. How all the security was white and involved full-body patdowns going in and out of coatcheck, and my inability to ask my friends what they thought of this WTFery even though I couldn't imagine that happening at eg. a Chinese community event flying in second-tier Hong Kong pop idols for the edification of a crowd skewing more toward 50s marrieds and 20s young professionals than rowdy teens. I don't know what I'd've said if they'd thought nothing of it because it was normal.

Then the earthquake happened and I end up thinking instead about how nothing is ever Someone Else's Problem anymore, the way it was when I was a kid; like 9/11, like the tsunami, it's always happening to someone I know. I don't know if that's good or bad (certainly it always seems to create new and improved opportunities for me to put my foot in my mouth, eg. emailing someone to bother them about the cell phone I lost in their car and only realizing hours later what they meant when they said "cannot meet today as must wait at home for news about my family"). Either way, though - and this is vague in my head but it feels important - when you read the articles and look at the awful pictures, don't think it's all dirty drinking water and gangsters and flattened shanty towns? Haiti is this close to bona fide failed statism and this natural disaster may well push it over the edge, but it has pop music and required reading in schools and an educated diaspora that struggles with whether they can do more for their country by going back or by staying abroad. Its people are resilient and love to dance. One day they'll get there.

Comprised of some of the stuff I've been spinning on the Chinese radio show lately. Station charter rules are that 7% of prime time ought to be Canadian music (something like that - rule of thumb is one song per hour-long show), and the policy is to keep it French. So I cheat by playing the one French track anglophone Quebecer artists include on their albums for this very purpose XD; (sometimes it's a bonus track: see Feist). The first two are from a "Montreal Attractions" segment on jazz.

Susie Arioli - Lumière de nuit: current incarnation known as "Susie Arioli Swing Band". She's pretty famous here although I don't know about elsewhere. This is the same idea as Feist's "Amourissima", actually - wistful evocation of tinny 1920s phonographs and sepia-poster radio-show girls in cloche hats.

The Lost Fingers - Coeur de loup: three-piece from Quebec City who specialize in upbeat gypsy jazz covers of 80s pop classics. They do a mean "Billie Jean"... come to think of it I should probably have uploaded that instead. XD; You'll know this one if you're French though ahaha.

(Philippe Lafontaine was Belgium's Eurovision entry in 1990 - with a song about a Macedonian girl, confusingly.)

Marie-Chantal Toupin - Avions de papier: Everyone liked this one, but then it's very Asian pop. XD;; I'm pretty sure I've already had it on a mix somewhere. From 1998, though this wasn't the album that broke her, and she hasn't done much like it since.

Not played on radio:

Jeff Buckley feat. Elizabeth Fraser - All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun: found out about this (and its back story) from that interview Liz Fraser recently did with the Guardian. Was I the last person on earth to know this existed?! (jokersama?)

Been playing Heaven and Las Vegas quite a bit, although last.FM refuses to log it for some reason. Last heard it probably in 2001, at which point I wasn't entirely able to appreciate it - although my understanding of Cocteau Twins is largely informed by the acts they inspired, like Faye Wong and Yoko Kanno (well, no one's said so but it's obvious). Since I'm supposed to work on a half-hour Tuesday culture show now I may use Faye Wong + Cocteau Twins in my pitch to Y.* Then I guess I'll have to do the Damon Albarn one I keep avoiding writing.**

***

Decade's End: I don't really want to start on this stuff until January, actually, since 1) I'm pedantic, 2) no one's paying me to stick to their schedule, and 3) I seriously believe cultural decades are staggered from calendar decades anyway, like the 00s didn't start until 9/11 (and centuries are staggered by a decade's worth or so: the last century didn't really kick off until the Titanic / Great War, and it's only now - 2010! - starting to feel like we're living in the 21st instead of the hangover of the 20th. This is why I've been reading so much SF, by the way). But I have to make some notes, or I'm just going to forget. XD;

So I have to write about:

--Utada Hikaru
--Kings of Convenience / Erlend Øye (although that would require me to listen to the Whitest Boy Alive albums which... I haven't)
--Relatedly, the whole recap on Postal Service / "bedroom electronica" / Morr Music / Junior Boys etc., the xx probably goes here which makes it actually current + maybe I will just do a flowchart of 00s Dance/Electronica, post it, and ask ppl to critique
--Peter Doherty (guaranteed the only Libertines essay you will ever read that's mostly about Saint Etienne)

And 2009 writeups:

--Surgeon
--Animal Collective: The Wank (siiiiigh)

--


* with added bonus that no one can tell these songs are being sung in English
** with added bonus that I can steal content off the blogs of those Asian girls who follow Graham Coxon around, /jk /jk

( wussy indie )

( Cohen covers )

( Skream remixes )

Will try to do this more often, so the music posts aren't so long!

The Rules:

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter. (If you want a letter, just say so.)
2. List (and upload/link) 5 (or more if you want) songs that begin with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

keelieinblack gave me an N, two weeks ago.

( Ciara )

( DJ Rolando and The Aztec Mystic )

( Laura Marling )

( Martha Wainwright )

Too tired, next batch tomorrow. XD;

No photos - didn't remember to bring a camera - so I have to make a note of it, or I'll forget when I went. XD;

Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks (Fred Falke Remix)
Grizzly Bear - Knife (Girl Talk Remix)

Fred Falke is on some kind of 2005-esque remix roll all of a sudden? I re-discovered the "Knife" remix just now, it is +Clipse and +Ying Yang Twins or rather Girl Talk correctly identified Ed Droste as an appropriate voice for "dude diva hooks" (remember the conversation about Kusano Masamune).

( My thoughts on Grizzly Bear, let me show you them )

Other notes on evening: band reiterated the bit about Le National being one of their favorite venues, as well it ought to be as it's a jewel. It has a springy wooden floor, for instance, tilted so everyone can see the stage no matter where they're standing. Incidental music playlist was GREAT, A+ would hire members of this band to DJ a party again. Audience was young, cute and fluffyheaded Scott Pilgrim &co. types, enthusiastic but too indie to be pushy. The vinyl sold out because everyone at the merch stand (manned by Chris Taylor) asked for vinyl, including me. I know I make fun of other music fans' illogic but shit, I have totally bought into this one. XD; It's not even for the sonic qualities. Emotionally these days music itself = free and CD = a doohickey you can buy at Wal-Mart for 0.25$/unit with the inherent value of disposable chopsticks, so you have to go to vinyl to feel like you've achieved the kind of ownership you have over a book made out of paper and cardboard stock. Plus there is nostalgia value for people my age, like collecting Hasbro toys. I don't know what vinyl feels like for the fluffyheads, though - probably like when I pick up my dad's twin-lens reflex Yashica from the 60's, something out of a steampunk fantasy film set, barely reconcilable with everyday existence.

Toward the end Ed Droste was like, "Are you guys going to hang around outside and start a street party as is the Montreal way? We might join you if you do! :D" which of course resulted in the entire audience hanging around outside the venue afterward, LOL. That part of Saint-Catherine is a pedestrian street in summer. If I were with friends I would have stayed but I didn't want to sit there and wait by myself, so I have no idea if the band actually did show up.

1) hemlocke, forgot to mention I got your postcard too! Thanks~ ^^

2) For the new year, bit the bullet and changed the journal layout to one of the new "minimalism" ones. Font size ought to be easier on the eyes. It's good to have access finally to standard layout options that look like they were designed less than five years ago.

3) To my own surprise, I'm actually using my douban for its intended purpose (tracking books, movies, and music consumed), as opposed to merely lurking in the Sexy Britpop Ojisan MST Photo Archive... I think it's basically an unauthorized Goodreads code fork, but well. Friend me if you have one? XD Currently trying to get East Asian IMEs up and running on this laptop, which I've been putting off for a year.

4) La Mala Educación: for instance, I logged this in douban but forgot to include it in my last post. It's... sort of the If On A Winter's Night A Traveler of GLBT filmmaking, isn't it? XD; One thinks one has a handle on what the story is about, then it turns out to be the first chapter of something else. When the credits rolled sororial unit and I looked at each other like, okay, so did not see the last 30 minutes of that coming.

We think Enrique is hotter than Angel, though that might be the role talking. Would make the most objectionable Libsdom AU fic ever (and Subdee and I have come up with some fairly objectionable ones).

5) A Bit of a Blur: the memoirs of Alex James, bassist of Blur and 3D shoujo manga character. I promised to review this for someone and planned to do it in conjunction with the Durrell tetralogy, but that won't be for a while, so. XD; ( Cut because this entry is getting longish. )

Blur feat. Françoise Hardy - To The End (La Comédie): I finally have FTP again! ...You guys thought I stopped uploading due to the newfangled Twitter software didn't you. Anyway, Alex James' book is best when he discusses topics relevant to my interests, such as New Order's Reading '98 set, or being invited over to Françoise Hardy's flat and offered cheese.** I'd actually been trying to track this down since Cathy's holiday mix last year. When I first watched the PMV I was like, "Ouran High School Host Club do Last Year at Marienbad, lulz," then I realized this was in fact an awesome fic idea. Now I'm kind of obsessed with it. XD; Think I'll go score Robbe-Grillet's script from Gallimard for reference, I've seen it there.

** Basically the pinnacle of dude's existence; also Graham Coxon's. Françoise Hardy, of course, immediately decided non-fan Damon Albarn was her favoritest Blur.

Benjamin Diamond - Inner Cycle Parts 1 & 2: this was the runway music for Dior Homme FW 2001-02 - the first Hedi Slimane collection, the one at which Yves Saint Laurent caused wank by showing up (given that he skipped the uhh Yves Saint Laurent ready-to-wear show, lulz). There's an article online where an indie band that scored a later DH show described getting a three-page email from Slimane asking them to make the music "melancholic" and "nonchalant" and oh yeah, about 17 minutes long. This may come as a surprise, but "Inner Cycle" sounds amazingly like the hypothetical result of that same email going out to the members of Stardust. XD; It is even approximately 17 minutes long.** (Though I don't know if the entire piece as-is was used in the show; part 2 is essentially a different track built on top of the same bassline. Or alternately, the same track "leaving baseline", in the chemical positivity sense. I SPEAK OF STRING EFFECTS.)

Benjamin Diamond released this as a limited edition 12" on his own label, in 2001 (titled Solitaire, same as the fashion show). And there it would have rested if Michael Mayer hadn't picked the track as the A-side of the first release from his Immer label, the mission statement of which was "to provide Michael Mayer with new copies of out-of-print records he is in danger of wearing out, and also to stop people from asking what the tracks were all the time." With the upshot that now you can download it from the Kompakt MP3 online shop, and I have just saved you one Euro. XD Somehow it makes sense that by throwing Hedi Slimane and French house in a blender, one makes a more-Kompaktian-than-Kompakt smoothie. Tim Finney's "neuromanticism" amirite. (39.5MB, download at own risk)

Hercules and Love Affair feat. Antony Hegarty - Blind: and this I first heard in Chanel AW 2008-09. It took me a while to follow up on it. XD I had a chance to see Hercules and Love Affair at Piknic this year (can't remember if it was live or a DJ set) but had stuff to do earlier on and sort of flaked out.

"Blind" is probably my favorite H&LA track. What I like about them isn't the disco cowbell and horns and diva warbling - though whoever had the brainstorm of casting Antony of the Johnsons in the latter role is a bona-fide GENIUS - but the Luomoesque time-dilation property some of their songs possess. Like listening to music stoned, except one isn't, and the track really is seven minutes long even if only three minutes ought to have passed. (9.1MB)

Gui Boratto - Haute Couture: pulsates and clatters away in the post-Oxia microtrance moment. His recent remix of Adam Freeland is more or less in the same vein, but better. (5.5MB)

( BONUS: MORRISSEY )

Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus has just shown me the underlying melodic (thematic?) similarity between "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "Teenage Kicks". Thanks, Miley... I think. :P


** That is, the Immer release is 17 minutes long, which I imagine took some squeezing on the 12". The original single was one 12-minute track called "Inner Cycle Parts 1 & 2" and one 5.5-minute track called "Lonesome Boy". /pedantic

...Yeah, this is for personal satisfaction really. Although there are mp3s. XD;

Bran Van 3000, Place-des-Arts (outdoors), July 1

Shared specificity with real peers in time and space, which I don't often get in music fandom. Also one of the all-time party bands. ♥ BV3 is of the lineage of great Montreal indie collectives and arrived on the turning point of the city going from not having a scene to - briefly - having the coolest scene worldwide (which is to say they made more money than Me Mom and Morgentaler, and considerably less than the Arcade Fire). Maybe they were the turning point, in some sense: the zeitgeist embodiment who showed up in the aftermath of the second referendum and were like hey dudes let's forget about it, go to the tams and chill out, man, just... chill. It tickles me immensely that they've become a going concern once again, though that means I have to get off my butt and buy the actual new album.

Bran Van 3000 - Rainshine: I wasn't seriously into music until mp3s took off, but looking back there's nothing much about my teenaged taste I'd disavow.** This is perhaps the best song on Glee, insofar as it doesn't cross genre lines but obliterates them three times over in as many minutes - the moment Sara Johnston's voice comes back in still gives me shivers. Magical mystical.

Bran Van 3000 - Afrodiziak: what I can't remember is if I enjoyed smooth R&B grooves that namechecked Marshall McLuhan, or if I had, in fact, no idea what dude was rapping about... Probably the latter.

Bran Van 3000 - Drinking in L.A.: and this, of course. I wrote my first piece of quote music criticism unquote on "Drinking in L.A.", for a CEGEP English assignment (and it was intended as music criticism, not a mere review ahaha... yeah, it's a problem orz). Found the 12" in a used record store the other week, while heading down Mont-Royal to meet ayabai and her friends at the tams, and promptly purchased it. Remixes by a cluster of Ninja Tunes and Turbo artists before they became (relatively) famous - including Tiga - on translucent turquoise vinyl. I didn't even know this song had remixes.

Not sure what it says that when I watch the video I can't tell it was made a decade ago.

There were more people for this than for the Leonard Cohen tribute concert, or maybe it just felt that way because I was stuck further back and spent my time working toward the front until I got right against the barrier. It was a party up there, anyway. XD They did play quite a few songs off their latest full length (good, but unfamiliar), and not enough off their second.

** If you can't see the brilliance of the first Savage Garden album then the more fool you.