An adaptation of Frank Zappa's musical, Thing Fish, is being performed next week at the Battersea Arts Centre. I'm thinking Saturday matinee. Get in touch if you wanna see it. Should be a laugh!
We got home from Glastonbury last night and wow, was it a great festival! Musical highlights were Ozomatli's brilliant, energetic morning set on the Pyramid Stage and Asian Dub Foundation's lively set. Billy Bragg, REM, Lemon Jelly and The Delgados were all good.
Of course, Glastonbury is about more than music. The vibe was great. Very relaxed and friendly. Weather was brilliant. A bit of rain on Friday morning and then blazing hot the rest of the weekend. Perfect!
I'll have some photos up once I get photos developed.
Sub Bass Snarl (and Kerrii) arrive in town tomorrow. They're playing on Sunday night. I finally managed to get details out of them. Apparently playing on laptops these days, due to problems with equipment earlier in the tour.
Sunday 22.6.2003
Moon Palace @ The Strong Rooms
120-124 Curtain Road
EC2A 3FQ
02074265100
(nearest tube Old St.)
4pm-12 midnight
FREE
special live guests:
dDamage (planet ?u/tsunami addiction)
Carthage (pause2/irritant)
Crunch (mas) dex and laptop set
guest DJ:
Sub Bass Snarl (Australia)
Nina
residents:
Prophane
Phil Summit
Dancon1
This Thursday night, a Bastard Pop experience at Asylum, corner of Charlotte Street "under the newsagent" apparently. Featuring Aussie pop mangler dsico.
This year's Meltdown is being curated by Lee "Scratch" Perry and the lineup looks a doozy! According to NME it includes Public Enemy, Tortoise, Michael Franti and Spearhead, DJ Spooky, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Asian Dub Foundation and Ozomatli. Ooh ooh ooh!
Annoyingly, some of the acts clash with Glastonbury again, just like last year. Fortunately it's only Asian Dub Foundation and Ozomatli who are both strong rumours for Glastonbury anyway.
I wonder if there's a ticket to the whole festival?
In case you haven't heard, dsico does crazy mad cut-up pop shit. Currently I'm listening to his remix of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart with Missy Elliot's Get Your Freak On. Yes that does sound bad but here's the rub, it actually works. So without further ado, go to the site and download some examples.
Apparently, coming to London this Summer.
Yeesh, tickets to this year's Glastonbury Festival have sold out, 24 hours after going on sale. That's 112,500 tickets or about 78 a minute. I guess I can forgive them for having a slow website yesterday morning.
Fortunately we managed to get some and it sounds like Liwood House and Jules did too. Hope everyone else who was planning on going got theirs!
The rumours are pretty good: Sigur Ros, Jurassic 5, Asian Dub Foundation, REM, Moloko. Cool! Regardless of the eventual lineup, last year's lineup was pretty crap but we had an amazing time. Just being camped in a field with 100,000 people is pretty amazing in itself.
A colleague at work brought in the new Asian Dub Foundation album on CD today for me to have a listen. This album was one of those albums on the "buy without even listening first" list, but I hadn't got around to buying it yet.
So I stick the CD into my computer and to my surprise it starts installing software and demanding I reboot the computer. This is a Windows machine here at work. I killed the player application it installed and opened my usual CD playing software, but it couldn't actually see the audio CD. That's because this CD isn't actually an audio CD.
In fact, it's a Copy Control "enhanced" CD. This means it's not recognised as an audio CD by computer drives, DVD players, games consoles and the like. Instead it should work on ordinary CD players, but nothing else.
For Windows users, a crappy little player application is included which plays back bad digitised versions of the tracks on the album. The player app is appalling, cutting out at the slightest amount of system load and sounding like a scratched CD. Even worse, the quality of the digitised versions is shitful and of course I won't be able to play the CD on any other platform, such as Linux.
So instead of buying this album which, as I said, is on my list of "must buy" CDs, I'll probably end up downloading it off the net. My that sure is an effective strategy to stop people downloading instead of buying!
The ADF guys are aware of the problem and are absolutely livid about it. Unfortunately, like most sharecropper musicians they have very little control over how their music is sold.
About the only thing you can do is, perhaps, buy the CD and return it as faulty because you can't play it. You might have to argue with the clerk, but you have every right to return it. You are entitled to a refund, not just an exchange, if the goods are not fit for purpose, at least in Australia. More information is available at the Campaign for Digital Rights.
While I'm somewhat underwhelmed by most of her musical output (it seems her collaborators do all the good stuff, hence Golden Boy and Felix Da Housecat had good results and The Hacker somewhat crap), there is a good 78 minute mix by Miss Kittin here on irobotnik, a fairly interesting blog if you're into electro, particularly the Electrocash type.
On a similar note, you might like to check out Client who apparently play in London every month on Thursdays. They have a release coming out shortly. Might pop along next week and check 'em out.