Zeni Geva/Ruins Alone - Corsica Studios 26/10/10

Again, I don't remember, this was October and I'm posting it in April. I just had the draft title there. Sorry, there's been a lot of shit happening in my life. I think this gig was pretty decent.

That's possibly my worst review so far. A whole new low...

The Lowest Form of Music - Beaconsfield 22-24/10/10

Arriving hot off the set of the new Spielberg film in which I play a silhouette in the background, I'm too late to catch Morphogenesis (shame) and just in time to see ten minutes of Tom Recchion, which is really quite pleasant, particularly the last section of his set which went all ambient chimes and relaxing atmospherics. Didn't dig the video too much just 'cause it didn't really need one.

Le Forte Four are up next after a cigarette and another £3 little bottle of beer, and they're entertainers, they're strange but true, they're a spastic ad break, a detuned TV station, their aerial needs adjusting. At one point Rick Potts plays a piece of polystyrene like a violin and it's horrible, but it's also brilliant, especially when he heckles the audience for not applauding his awesome solo.

Smegma build up, the guitar is pretty wack. And the femme vox. I made a note in my phone about this but I lost my phone so I don't remember. Use paper notebooks people.

Saturday no go for me, I didn't want to see that bitch girlfriend of mine. Sunday, Raionbashi &Kutzelina yodel performance strangely predictable. Dinosaurs with Horns strangely unlistenable, garbled, directionless. The Tenses was Ju Suk and Oblivia and they were pretty good. Hijokaidan were ridiculous and had skinny guys acting like they were big men.

This is a draft of the review that I never got around to finishing and now it's six months later and I can't remember what I was gonna say about any of it so you just get this series of notes and ideas which haven't been strung together coherently which is actually quite in keeping with the whole LAFMS style or at least that's my excuse.

Wet Paint/Big Deal/The Racket - Old Blue Last 11/10/10

I've been to a heap of gigs between this and Mark Kozelek but they've mostly been one's I've played at or one's with my girlfriend playing or Aphex gigs that I've worked at and I don't want to review myself and I don't want to review Mari's band again and again (it's always great really) and I don't want to review a job.  Having said that, Wet Paint is my mate Babak's band and I'm gonna review him now, but I feel the need for it so that's how it is. Also, Big Deal were cool.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, first off, this is a night to launch Babak's comic, Hilarious Consequences. I just finished it and I liked it a lot. It's like Jeffrey Brown, except I don't like Jeffrey Brown. It's funny and you should buy it is what I'm saying.

The first band tonight were The Racket and they were bloody awful. I mean I felt embarrassed for them, and it wasn't just that their music was crappy it was that they couldn't even play their crappy music well. I went and stood outside and to make sure I missed the end of their set I stayed there for ages and ended up missing the second band completely.  Such is gigs.

Big Deal played next and even though they're absolutely not my usual bag, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It probably helped that I was on my own and trying really hard not to be cynical. Plus they're really very easy on the eye. They're just a boy and girl, two guitars and two mics. Dead simple stuff and all the lyrics are about oh why won't you let me in I love you etc but they get away with it because their voices both sound like they should be singing that kind of trite teen stuff. So they were nice anyway, then Wet Paint played and they were really loud and loads better than last time I saw them and I prefer their newer stuff as it's a bit less by the numbers 90's America and on the whole a bit more inventive and veering closer to the kind of stuff I'm interested in. They played well and even when Siamak stood on his tuner pedal by accident at the end of the last song he rescued the situation by taking his bass off and doing a robot dance in place of a bassline.  It was good, modest, fun and I had a relaxing night which is an achievement in itself these days.

Mark Kozelek - Union Chapel 29/07/10

i'm sitting in a church about to see a guy called mark koyzelev or something. That's what the guy in front of me is writing on some live feed thing on his iPad while I'm sitting in a church waiting to see Mark Kozelek. Who the fuck brings an iPad to a gig? In a church? After checking some useless shit out on his toy he finally puts it away only to immediately pull out an iPhone and start texting. I look around to see if anyone else has noticed this guy, this slick old cunt with multiple touchscreens on his person. This slimy fuck who conducts his affairs by sliding his fingers all over everything. I look around and instead of seeing other furrowed brows I see more iPhones. I'm not joking, the woman he's with has an iPhone, the woman to the left of me has an iPhone, the woman just past the man on my right has an iPhone, and they're all sliding shit about, prodding at the luminous little tablets like apes at a monolith, receiving and disseminating useless information, looking at fuck all for no reason, contacting someone else for no reason. I don't know exactly what each of them was doing, but it doesn't matter, they're doing something when they should be doing nothing. Do you really have to go on the internet right now, can you not just sit for ten minutes and wait for a man to come and play the guitar? The man immediately to my right thankfully doesn't have an iPhone, instead he has a disgusting cough and snort routine worked out, whereby every minute or so he coughs really loudly and follows it up with a big hock of phlegm up the back of the nose there. And the guys behind me are having an incredibly boring conversation about photoshop, incredibly boring even by usual photoshop conversation standards. It is possibly the most jaw clenchingly irritating bit of a crowd I've ever been in.

That said, Mark Kozelek is excellent and the venue is exceptionally complementary to his show. Sat alone on stage with just his guitar, partially candlelit against a backdrop of stained glass, he runs through a choice selection from Admiral Fell Promises, a few April songs and a couple of older ones including a nice variation of Carry Me Ohio. His fingerpicking is deft and delicately done, with the occasional rough strum for emphasis. It's not perfect, he fucks up a pluck here and there, but it's unimportant. No-one in the world could play these songs better. Watching him play The Leaning Tree sends shivers in waves from my fingers up my face and makes me want to cry, the transitions in the end section of Blue Orchids achieve a dreamlike fluidity I didn't think possible in waking life and hearing You Are My Sun live has to be one of the prettiest things I've ever encountered in my life ever ever ever.

Even the banter is brilliant, with some lad shouting out that he wants to get hold of tab or whatever so he can play Kozelek's songs to which he replies "you... concentrate on playin' your own stuff" and after a pause continues "you need to spend less time on the internet, shut down that twitter account, get rid of that facebook page, you'll get good at something" which earned a huge round of applause and left me feeling less guilty about all the mental vitriol I was heaping on the people around me before the gig.

So, despite the fact that the iPad guy in front of me is looking at his iPhone every two minutes and has a head like a semi erect cock, lolling from side to side blocking my view over and over to the point where I want to smash his face into the fucking bench in front of him, it still manages to be gig of the year.

Thanks again Mark Kozelek, and please don't slash your wrists like you said you would at the end of the set. Great, thanks, bye!

NOTE: I have draft reviews of all the gigs between this one and the last one I posted about (metalking?), and I've been slowly trying to catch up to the present, but I'm gonna go ahead and leave a big gap there because I want to post this review now. Maybe I'll come back to the others, maybe I'll leave a gap there forever. Who knows? I don't.

Metalking: RICHARLES BRONSON / RIOJIM + PAUL ABBOTT / SEYMOUR WRIGHT / ROSS LAMBERT - Cafe Oto 03/04/10

Fuck knows.

Someone did some stuff on film, letting the projector burn through the film, that sort of thing. It was alright I guess. I don't remember the rest. I might not even have seen anyone else actually.

What a review. Possibly a new low that one.

Stinking Lizaveta/some other bands - Bardens Boudoir 01/04/10

Going back over my notes I see I wrote two things about this gig so I'll just reproduce them here and let that be the review:

1. Drummer looks like a dead crackwhore dragged out of a swamp that someone has resurrected and put an evening dress on. And she's angry about it. And she's still on crack.

2. The guitarist seems to be playing the national anthem. Really emphatically, over and over. I actually find it puts me off his guitar playing because he looks so fucking happy all the time.

I couldn't remember this gig at all before I checked my notes and now it's all so vivid thanks to those two observations there. They really sum up everything. What did they sound like, you say? Well they sounded like they looked (see above).

These Plumes have Feathers/Guy from Bo Ningen - Catch 22 26/03/10

I went to see these acts after having a bit of a weird experience with an osteopath and I could hardly walk, stand still or sit down which made it a little tricky to relax as you can imagine. These Feathers Have Plumes, quietly battling a dastardly wobbling table, created a dreamy collage of bowed bass and humming wine glasses which soothed my ailing spine a little, before the guy from Bo Ningen whose name I can't remember played some laptop noise and shouted a bit and I think he might have even (sort of) played guitar. It was alright. I don't remember really, I'm writing this months after the event and I was doped up on ibuleve at the time.

Fun.

Florian Hecker Sound Installation - Chisenhale Gallery

Well this was totally pleasant. I enjoyed walking around it for sure, just a big white room with some speakers set up playing some noises which I'm sure Hecker put a lot of effort into creating and which probably represent some precise concept involving the science of sound and space and all sorts of fascinating mathematical ideas I don't know about because I couldn't be bothered picking through all the sesquipedalian guff on the accompanying info sheet.

One of the pieces bounced off some tiles stuck on the wall, another came from overhead, another came from a row of speakers at undulating heights... I mean, I have no idea what he's saying, unless all he's saying is check out these interesting sounds, but I had a thoroughly pleasant time until a couple of 2.4 nuclear families who apparently hadn't seen each other for a while happened to meet by chance in there and decided it would be an appropriate place to catch up on their life stories. It wasn't.

Here's a video where you can experience what Hecker's carefully sculpted pieces sound like when recorded on the shitty little mic on a flip HD mini camcorder. It's perhaps more effective as a document of how people move about in a big room when guided by their ears. It stars Horacio Pollard, both members of Kayaking and Joel from Wet Sounds/Trash Club. Enjoy!

Oneohtrixpointnever/No Fun Acid - The Grosvenor 18/3/10

Well everyone has been all ONeohtrixpointnever is the best thing to happen for ages, he's so awesome and he's the best so I thought hey I'll go along then and besides I got old Konxy to wing me in so I di9nt aff ta pay nowt. It was at The Grosvenor which has been a bit too regular as of late, seeing as it's a bit of a 'mish' to get too but hey ho ey. Carlos Giffoni also known as No Fun Acid played a decent enough acid set on hardware made for exactly that and people seemed to like it well enough and I seemed to like it well enough so that was that, nothing spectacular but certainly solid and it was nice to see it being kept 'real', a popular yardstick by which to judge any genre of music over five years old (probably less nowadays, with kids failing to keep new genres of music real for even a couple of weeks before being accused of ruining the scene/selling out/fakin it or whatever kids do these days. I don't know, I'm not one, I didn't understand them when I was one and I doubt that'll change anytime soon. Maybe when I reach old age and start to shrink and rely more on others and just regress generally, maybe then with that combination of
pseudo child like state and the benefit of hindsight will I be able to understand kids. Of course I will be very old and the knowledge useless. Anyway, who cares, Carlos Giffoni is about forty and none of this stuff applies to him.

Oneatickspooneva was up next and he played a nice enough set of ambient keyboards and seagull sounds. It was alright, I thought that kind of thing had been done in spades over thirty years ago but
apparently it's new and exciting. Or maybe he's just keeping it real too. Who knows eh. All I know is that it was fairly pleasant music in fairly unsuitable surroundings done ok.

Jazz Poetry Night - Pangaea Project 10/2/10

Ok everybody thanks for coming I'm gonna do the ice cream song.
La la la la ice cream song
La la la la ice cream song
La la la la ice cream song
La la la la ice cream song

What a shitty night.

Brotzman/Edwards/Noble - Cafe Oto 29/1/10

Brotzman fucking ripped it, Edwards was his usual awesome-on-the-bass self and Steve Noble looks like he carries a knife. They also had a dude on piano who I didn't know but who was excellent and the best bit of the whole night was when Brotzman wasn't even playing and the other three were all freaking out, just fully freaking out and all stopped suddenly all three of them without looking at each other or anything, just stopped perfectly together. It was fucking magic. Jazz magic. Jazz fucking magic. No lie.