Here’s a bomb drop of songs that are new/good/fresh in some way for me this week.

You can hear all music related to this blog at Spotify, including tracks played on the old Tunes On A Plate show. It’ll be updated with each new post.

Mandy Moore – When I Wasn’t Watching

I haven’t really thought much about Mandy Moore since I was a teenager. I was there when Candy (this was such a massive number… 2?!?!?! hit in Australia), Crush (trumped by Jennifer Paige’s Crush IMO) and I Wanna Be With You were gigantic pop staples in the hallways of my preppy high school. She was sweet, saccharine and sexy, and of course, I hated it.

But there was something less fake, less bought and sold about her that always kept her in the back of my mind. I knew years later that she was in a long term relationship with Ryan Adams, and that was of no consequence until just recently.

But regardless of everything in her past, she’s dropped a new single, and it’s fucking sensational. It’s got some real late 80’s/early 90’s Stevie Nicks vibes for me, and rocks an interesting chorus arrangement.

Charli XCX – Gone (ft Christine & The Queens)

Holy shit, I’ve been pretty wrapped up about Charli’s new record for a while now. 1999 was an uncompromising monster of a single, released at the back end of last year, and in classic ‘waterfall’ fashion, we’ve had drops of singles up until the album’s release this month.

Gone was also a pre-album release, and I passed it off as uninteresting the first time I heard it. But the hook stayed with me, and when it fell on me a couple of times over the course of the next month, it latched onto my brain and now I think it’s one of the pop picks of the year.

My feelings all peaked when watching this performance on Fallon this evening. I’ve had few passes at the wonderful pop record Charli has assembled, and everything she is as a performer is on stage right here. But I got truly staggered by Christine in this video, she’s absolutely gigantic here and makes the performance what it is. Don’t skip this. And pay hard attention to the breakdown.

Grimes & i_o – Violence

Grimes continues down a darker path with her recent output with the clinically catchy and entrancing Violence. Personally, I never had an in with Grimes, apart from a fleeting enjoyment of Oblivion, until We Appreciate Power, because I always find it so damn fascinating when pop mixes its colours with heavy rock guitars and tones.

There’s definitely less of that here, this song is more about a few simple ideas smooshed together, and after listening to this track on a few different sound systems, I’ve come to notice that this song just doesn’t have any guts without the sensational bass throb throughout. Listening to this on tinny or cheap speakers is a completely different experience, the bass creates this haunting, hypnotic vibe that really makes this song what it is. I’m really interested in what else Miss_Anthropocene has in store.

Danny Brown – Best Life

Danny Brown has his hands all over a bunch of projects, his new record U Know What I’m Sayin’ is out on October 4th, and I really got attached to Danny after his last full record, Atrocity Exhibition. He’s got his own TV show called Danny’s House, he STILL has one of the most interesting voices in hip hop. I want this.

Underworld – STAR

I don’t think Underworld have any fucking right to be this fucking good in 2019. To come all the way from Underneath The Radar, to this series of experimental releases they’ve been putting out called Drift over the last year, it’s fucking ridiculous that Underworld are still here, still relevant and still doing important things in the underground electronic music world. This song has a vocal cadence that is similar to their mega hit from the Trainspotting soundtrack ‘Born Slippy‘, with the same wry sense of humour. Take a longer look at the Drift series and see what else you can pull out of it.

Candy – Super-Stare

Candy are definitely one of the most brutal hardcore acts getting around at the moment. To the point that I get scared to put their record on, because I know what I’m in for. Their last record, Good To Feel, has languished in my Spotify saved records, because I know how good it is, I just talk myself out of ever being in a mood to put it on.

I’ll soon have another record to feel guilty about. Super-Stare is a 7 inch release out on Relapse, and it’s fuill of distortion, reverb and roughness.

2 exciting events happening on the very same night in Canberra this weekend, both involving myself in some fashion.

First up, I had the adorable Faux Faux Amis join me in Melbourne way back in January 2014, to record a couple of tracks that didn’t quite fit the 1 minute format of their debut record, X.

I had a modest little studio at the time, a big tin and brick garage with some very haphazard soundproofing left by a previous housemate. I made some fun and interesting recordings in the garage, but it had no windows and was suffocatingly hot in the summer.

The recordings that we did on a very warm January Saturday in Yarraville first saw the light of day as a re-imagining, as myself and the band weren’t too satisfied with how the recording of the slower song, Holiday Inn, came out. My good friend Paul Heslin took my stems and created a very solid, different mix of the track with trumpet from Nicholas Combe, and added some superb backing vocals from Catherine James. Hear it above.

The other track, which I’m quite proud of, is called 50/50 (hear a sample of the beginning of the track above) and it finally sees the light of day this Saturday the 6th of August at the Phoenix on a cassingle. These were some of my most successful experiments with recording very fuzzy guitars, and the very trashy, over-compressed sound of the drums gave this track the honest garage sound that I was looking for. It’s an example of what I want to hear in my brain actually coming out into a mix, and I’m super happy with the results. Bruce Callaway at Broken Knee Studios gave the recording a nice compression master that added some more bite.

Tape is the perfect medium for this recording, I can’t wait to hear it on my dad’s Akai CS-F210 cassette deck.

The other exciting event this Saturday, I’ve been asked by the wonderful Fossil Rabbit (Chris Finnigan) to join the aforementioned Paul Heslin and Reuben Ingall at a night of experimental music at Smiths Alternative, also on the 6th of August. I’ve delved back into a Future Conduits live set I’ve been teasing at for a long time, that allows me to play and affect beats on my APC40 controller while also playing other things without always looking at a computer screen.

Reuben and Paul are very longtime friends and former bandmates of mine, we toured to Tasmania and Sydney in 2013 when I was fiddling with my adapted Nintendo Power Glove (a project which I hope to restart in the future), and I’ve had some of the best times of my life with these two, and it’s always great to play beside them. Paul recently had a residency in Finland, and is spending his time making music with a Raspberry Pi, and Reuben recently released his 3rd solo record, called Microclimates, on Feral Media, and released a split EP with Logic Lost on the Tandem Tapes label.

I recorded all of the Future Conduits EP in the previously mentioned garage in Yarraville, it was a real lesson in gradually building tracks to completion and slowly feeling confident with the results over time. Danny Wild produced a video for Black Sweat, and it still surprises me when I remember I have a video for a track that I produced.

This is likely to be my (first and) last show in Canberra this year, I’m taking off overseas from the end of August for adventures that I’ll detail in a later post.

For now, check out this unreleased Future Conduits track called Funky Drummer.

Had some time in the home studio with the Norah Jones Half Hour, they came to me with, and I quote, “two finished songs and 3 other things” that actually felt alot more realised than they led on.

I’ve known Nathan Harrison and Emma McManus for a few years, travelling to the Phillipines with them both on separate occasions, listening to Nathan’s podcast that chews through every song in Triple J’s Hottest 100 from its inception, and seeing Emma perform under a bedsheet in a Tomato Kick in Quezon City, and also occasionally join Pocket Fox onstage around Canberra. They’re both also involved in the Sydney theatre collective Applespiel, who are amazing and played my bass guitar onstage at the Malthouse in Melbourne one time, OMG.

They’ve played live twice so far, on both occasions they supported Finnigan & Brother (another band I’ve had my ugly mitts on a few times), who are accused of creating NJHH by not looking hard enough for other support acts and calling Nathan and Emma on their bluff when they said they’d create a band to support them.

So the idea that they now have a recording that I’m producing is a weird one, but honestly they’ve written some super interesting tunes with hilarious lyrics. Crime Fighting Shame Blog dives into the world of photographing manspreaders on public transport then posting the photo on the internet, All Your Faves Are Problematic draws back the curtain on blindly following celebrities, trends and pop humour, and the NJHH anthem THE NORAH JONES HALF HOUR GLOWER POWER HOUR kinda just needs to be heard to be believed.

Nathan’s love of TISM is so welcome on these tracks, I’d love to hear more of that sort of influence on any Australian music at all, and they both bring some great performance chops to the vocals on all these songs.

Have a listen to Crime Fighting Shame Blog, right below:

Two of my good friends David Finnigan and Jordan Prosser are currently in Melbourne, and have been for the last few months, knocking together a piece called Crimeforce: LoveTeam, a script centered around boy bands in 2050, and they asked me to think about and deliver some work based around what music may be like in 2050. You can read more about it over at David’s website.

They were toying with Law & Order early on in the process, and purely out of seeing them playing with some of those tropes, I used the MusicMappr site to help generate a remix of the Law & Order Theme, something I’ve called Ordered Law.

I had a great time collating research from various platforms, looking into possibilities and things that may not actually change at all.

My blurb for the performances is below, with links to two tracks created using algorithmic music making tools.

2050 is a long way away. It’s (hopefully) in the back end of my own life cycle, and ruminating on musical advances up to then has been an interesting and thought-provoking exercise. I’ve found myself speaking to the GROWTH scenario, as it has the more fleshed out world-view and progression.

In this world, I feel that music has been pushed along continually by technological advances, as it always has. The difference exists in the way music is created, with record labels becoming more akin to how Spotify and Apple manage their playlists at the moment, by recruiting taste-makers and cultural heads to plot out music in a certain style or mood. The music itself will be created by computers, with the limits on a computer’s ability to recreate the complex timbre of specific instruments slowly being lifted. We are seeing now through websites like Jukedeck and Google’s Magenta project that computers can make respectable copies of songs given certain parameters, although at the moment these songs are rarely used for much else than royalty-free background sound in videos. There will likely be music making software created for use in a VR world, where complex instruments can be played by anybody.

Youth and protest music will continue to exist, fringe groups will continue to play fringe music for niche markets, and the pop mainstream will continue to co-opt them for want of a trend or fad, and then as quickly, discard them once they are no longer relevant. There may be a rise in the nostalgia and fetishization of ‘golden era’ pop music instrumentation (Beatles, Stones, Doors), but this may also just be another fad that waffles on for a few years.

Moving into the lyrical space, my research has suggested that in over 100 years of ‘pop’ music (music sold to the masses for playback on personal or in-home sound systems), very little has changed about the core centre of the pop verse. Take this comparison of Arthur Collins Hello! Ma Baby from 1899 with Drake’s Hotline Bling.

Both address the use of phones to communicate with their respective partners, both stress the want and need for love via phone conversation. That’s 117 years of cultural change, and yet still there are such heavy similarities between pop verse.

So, I see very little changing in another 34 years. People will still reach out for love via song, either professing or wantonly calling for it through the medium of song. These lyrics, however, I don’t see being computerised or boiled down to a formula, as I feel this basic human connection and outward emotion is the core of the relate-ability in a pop song, and it wouldn’t survive without an entity expressing themselves. There may possibly be a rise in the creation of personas and characters, but I still feel some of the strongest messages in pop are and will continue to be through direct human emotion.

I created two tracks that were composed using the Jukedeck platform. The first (Hackney Revenge) is a pop song carved entirely by Jukedeck, using parameters that I have set, and the second (Stepford Wonderland) is a collection of 3 different Jukedeck tracks, morphed by me to fit with each other. This is an example of what I feel the music making process will be like at some point in the future, with the skill ceiling for makers to create a track getting lower and lower, to the point where the music is made for you, you just change a few parameters to suit your taste, and anyone who creates music like that can now be called a ‘Musician’.

Finally releasing her out into the wild. My previous post listed all my thankyous, i’ll let the tracks themselves do the rest of the talking.

Video for Black Sweat, concocted by Danny Wild (Calico Cat):

Way back at the start of 2014, my generally handsome friend Nathan and another spectacularly awesome friend Emily Rose were looking to take a theatre show to Adelaide, a show that I never got to see because they only put it on in Adelaide, but as such, they needed funds and they put on an afternoon of entertainment in the backyard of Emily Rose’s house on Australia Day. Here’s a charming little promo video for the day.

They asked me to do a mix and I had been experimenting with DJing in the latter half of 2013, performing in my final year of my Bachelors in Sound Production as a live onstage DJ in Raimondo Cortese‘s St Kilda Tales. The show was a ton of fun, and I’ve had a great deal of fun cleaning up this set and putting it out to you all now. Will hopefully be adding future mixes to the wonderful Mixcloud site.

Download the mix HERE.

Over the last year I’ve been sporadically working on some electronic music, tracks that directly reference my inspirations, influences and hopefully convey a slice of original thought amongst the compressed waveforms. It’s not quite ready to share yet, but I’m on the cusp of getting these tracks out and re-entering the larger musical landscape by sticking my big toe into the water again.

I’ve had some great support over the last 8 months while finding time to complete these tracks, whether it was subtle words of encouragement from my dear friends Nate Troisi, Reuben Ingall, Nick Delatovic, Paul Heslin and David Finnigan, or actual contributions to the end product by Nick D again, Becki Whitton, George Rose, and Danny Wild & Luke McGrath who are cooking up video aesthetics to tie to a couple of the songs.

I’ve really taken my time with the creation of these songs, and the overall concept and design of the entire product that has become Future Conduits. At the start of the year I looked down at a metal panel at Yarraville train station and saw a sign that had allusions and connections to things that don’t exist yet, but someday will, and that tied together with my attitude to music, the hope of things to come and the possibility of something amazing being right around the corner, or a few years down the track. So I’ve deliberately tried to not rush anything to do with this project, to let it happen organically and to work on it when I’ve felt the time is right. I’ll confess to some perfectionist leanings in trying to correct things that could be better served by moving on and fixing those problems in my next project, but I’ve learnt alot in trying to complete these four tracks, and I feel as though my work now has a well trodden path to walk down and out of my brain.

So here’s the artwork, designed by the darling and generous George Rose. She is a stunning visual artist who inspires me to create alot and often, and her work ethic around her art is really something to behold.

The first FCEP will see the light of day before 2014 is out.

Over on my Soundcloud, I’ve been hosting an old EP that I made after hearing my good friend Reuben Ingall chop and screw some pop classics with reckless abandon. The tracks on my EP have all reached their 100 download limit, and three tracks have all been downloaded over 1000 times since May 2011. Not bad for something I didn’t really expect to appeal to anybody.

I’m particularly fond of the Veruca Salt, Alanis Morrisette and Tracey Bonham versions. Veruca Salt are transformed into a slowly shuffling Kyuss, Alanis Morrisette hugs the rail between Nickelback and Jesu, and Tracey Bonham channels Isis’s best moments in the chorus of Mother Mother.