frey

Check out Beautiful Haze by SJD

It’s a beautiful song, and it’s making me think of home..

64 square feet of audio cassette tape madness.

[edit, to clear up some confusion] no, I didn’t make this, but isn’t it cool?

is up on DailyMotion

and YouTube

I love Sutekh. He has a wonderfully disrespectful and flippant approach to the world, especially the world of business, its mundanity and its stupidity… there’s a track on his album Fell called Recession Clouds that starts with a sample of some boring middle-management type giving the most stunningly dull speech. It’s awesome.

I went to Leeds on Sunday night to see Richie Hawtin play, came back on Monday (the train system here is amazing, I don’t know why the locals complain).

Richie seemed to be oversold by about 30% (apparently it wasn’t? not sure if I believe that though..) so it was hot and sticky and gross and I couldn’t get a good dance on because wasted people kept banging into me, like literally every 30 seconds, for the whole bloody night. And I mean wasted. The ratio of wasted people to not wasted people must’ve been about 100:1. At a gig like this back home it would be more like about 4:1.

Musically he was not so hot. I love Decks Efx & 909, it’s my favourite techno record eva, but Richie seems to have ditched much of his analog gear in favour of just a laptop between the turntables. As a result there seemed much less of the analog fuckery that works so nicely on DE&9, the majority of the stuff he was doing was playing around with a very short digital delay with adjustable feedback and filters: one trick, in other words, rather than many; and a lot less live-music-making, which I was hoping for.

The place closed at 4am and turfed everyone out, and I was on my own, so I went to find somewhere warm to be. Found an Indian takeaway that gave me samosas and hot tea until they closed at 5 (why do all the takeaway places here serve everything with chips? and suck?), then wandered around until places started opening at 7. The first train I could get out wasn’t until 9, but I wanted to see some art galleries, so I stuck around the paranoid security-conscious University until 9, wandered down to the city gallery and found it was closed until May, and the Henry Moore institute whose gallery was also closed until tomorrow, curses curses. So I went to the Royal Armoury Museum, which was bloody weird and slightly creepy, and what’s more was overrun with roleplaying geeks having a smelly, slightly overweight and hairy conference of some kind.

I’m settling in very nicely. Have a lovely flat in Moseley, Birmingham, which is the trendy artsy part, kinda like the Aro Valley in Wellington.

My flat looks like this:

My and my old friend Steven from Opunake, who is now living in London, went out to Sutton Park, which includes an ancient forest of ash and oak and beech trees. It looks like this:

Today I made an enormous amount of muesli. It looks like this:

(well, you can’t really tell it’s enormous from the photo. compare it with the size of the orange in the background perhaps? you’re looking at maybe 2kg’s of homemade muesli, anyway.)

edited to come, I do promise.. eventually.