Friday, June 19, 2009

Deerhunter

Photo: Big Stereo

This week Atlanta four piece Deerhunter played in Auckland and Wellington.

I interviewed them for Nightline tyring to find out how they define their sound.

Part indie rock, part post-punk psychadelic and even some ambient noise.

Watch the story here

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Hip Hop and um......?

In the 6th month of this year (really? already?) it seems that things are heating up for hip hop(the majority of major releases generally drop toward the tail end of the year). So far this year we've seen new forward thinking commercial talent introduced in the form of Kid CuDi(don't act like you didn't like that 'Day n Nite' Crookers remix, I saw you on the floor.....) and Drake, who made everybody flip with 'Best I Ever Had'(which is about to kill iTunes).

We have also seen releases from veteran underground beat makers such as Madlib with The Beat Conductor vol. 5-6 and just last week, a posthumous release from the late J-Dilla with Jay Stay Paid, and can I say that it is a magnificent album too. Definitely check out Milk Money, 24K Rap, See That Boy Fly and KJay And We Out(among MANY others). If you like hip hop beats without the rapping there's more than enough to keep you happy on this installment as only 10 of the 28 tracks feature MC's(such as Black Thought of The Roots, Raekwon of Wu-Tang fame, Havoc of Mobb Deep, Lil Fame of M.O.P, Doom and also Illa J). So I'd highly recommend that album for the underground, slightly cultured cats who aren't too concerned with hip hop politics and tragic punts at product differentiation(T Pain, you look like a dick with that top hat bro, c'mon).

Speaking of top hats, Jay-Z dropped his first single off his third release in his Blueprint album series on Saturday afternoon called "D.O.A" or "Death Of Autotune". Now this is interesting in many ways. Firstly the radio stations that give him spins(or will at least with this one, I highly doubt we'll hear it on C4, or ZM for that matter) have slowly and painfully grown to embrace faux autotune songs. This sound is the general lane commercial artists are going through to get a song out there currently and thats a formula if ever I saw one. Now, not only is this a complete mind fuck for hip hop's identity and its continued merger with RnB, but it also means that Jigga has found himself in somewhat of a predicament. The questions get raised: Does he still have the industry pull he had 5 years ago? Is it too difficult for the industry to move away from autotune? Has the consumer moved past boom-bap and further toward Flo Rida's trance induced nightmare?
D.O.A was premiered on Funk Flex's show that afternoon and minutes later Twitter went absolutely nuts. To give you an idea, 10-15 minutes afterward Jay-Z was the most highly discussed topic as was evident with 5 of the top ten topics relating to Jay-Z, all discussing the song. I guess thats the desired effect nowadays. The track was produced by Kanye and Chicago icon No I.D(who taught Kanye how to make beats). So I'm over talking about DOA. Check it out though, the beats real nice, Jay, not so amazing though.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Brainslaves

Last night I caught the Brainslaves last gig in NZ before they leave for Sydney to crack the Australian market.

It was a wicked set, and as well as their finale show, they were also shooting a music video for their single weekend story.

I shot some photos of them rehearsing and recording on thursday night. Check them out...




Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Ghostface Killah coming to a town near you! (if you live in Auckland)

Ghostface Killah, aka Tony Starks, aka Pretty Toney, aka Ironman, seminal member of the WU TANG CLAN, is coming to the Powerstation for one show only on June 20.

If you miss this, I know you will be kicking yourself forever - correct me if I'm worng, but wasn't the last time a Wu member came was when RZA played St James in 2003?

Tickets are $60.

In case you're umming and aahing on this one, here's a reminder why you shouldn't miss.



David Ellis

A couple of months ago I did a story for Nightline on Brooklyn artist David Ellis.

Ellis takes a photo of himself painting a picture every eight seconds, then puts it all together to make "motion painting".

Today my mate Gus put this on my wall, it's a collaboration between David Ellis and producer Dhundee.

Check it out.

Max Thompson

Max is a 21 year old graduate of AUT's bachelor of graphic design.

He's an illustrator, and has created a children's character called Tilda Von Tickleberry.

Check out some more of his work here or scroll down for a look.



Sunday, May 31, 2009

The Decemberists - The Wanting Comes in Waves


American indy, folk-rock, five piece The Decemberists. From their latest album The Hazards of Love, this track is a killer! It comes into its own around 1:43 when that dirty riff kicks in, but the first minute an a half do a great job setting it up. Check it out.

Friday, May 29, 2009

1000 acres vodka



This is a sick package design I found on The Dieline

The one on the right is especially awesome.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

KOZYDAN - impressive illustrators.


LA based husband and wife illustrators Kozue and Dan Kitchens have got illustration sorted.


Bunny rabbits, satirical panoramics, Evil Knievil and a few shots at dubya. Kooky and damn cool.


Check out the colours in their panoramics.


They exhibited at Webbs in 2007 which I was lucky enough to see. Their work was snapped up super-quick.

Hopefully they return.

[Scroll down for pink dog, courtesy of Kozyndan]

Tame Impala



Perth trio Tame Impala. They sound a lot like cream but with a more modern sound.

I'm pretty sure they only have an EP out but they are worth checking out.

Listen to their track "Half Glass Full of Wine" here

The last bastion of truth and information.




I was looking after my nephew last week, he is nearly three years old and of Rarotongan, Chinese, Maori and Eurpoean descent. His speech is ok, but mostly he tends to mimic what others say which as you could imagine is very cute.

After an hour or so he told me he wanted to watch "toot toot" on the "puta". For the toddler illiterate that means he wants to visit the Wiggles homepage on the internet. Obviously.

He led me up the stairs, hopped on the 3/4 size computer chair, turned on the computer and waited for it to load.

Feeling a little unwanted I was relieved when he asked me to get "toot toot". Phew...uncle credibility restored.

Unfortunately this only lasted a few minutes because once the site was up and running Tana pushed me out of the way and dominated the website.

I was completely useless.

It was then it occurred to me that people who were born after the year 2000 will never think of technology and information the way we did.

A library for example will never be seen as the go to place for information and research. But merely a quiet room where you can read fiction and magazines.

At high school the library was the first place you turned to if you wanted to find information. Now its google and CRTL F. No more indexes and glossaries. Try key words and tags.

Encyclopedias are also irrelevant, even the word sounds archaic. When was the last time you checked your dusty brittanica to prove that Johannesburg is South Africa's largest city.

The nineties birthed the internet but they also slowly killed the library.

Monday, May 4, 2009

An evening with Nicky

So tonight I listened to Nicky Hager speak about the state of journalism, which is a subject lacking any positivity at best. Nicky followed this path, dedicating 45 minutes of his one hour spiel to the way journalism has turned into an arm of public relations - not a stand-alone occupation.

Obviously it followed all the usual paths - capitalism, corporate control and the regurgitation of "paid voices". In this sense the negatives Nicky stated were much the same as you'll find in any article related to the political economy of media and the celebrification of news media - popularity over integrity.

One thing which did surprise me was Nicky's take on the survival of the newspaper. All I have read (and assumed myself) is that the rise of the internet and the shift of papers to the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them. I remember reading an article not long ago about the amount of magazines which are started, go to print once, fail and the next month they are nowhere to be seen. Why buy magazines when most of them are also online (albeit a month later)? I assumed papers were going the same way.

Newspaper will survive according to Nicky. He says the online arm of newspapers are funded by the advertising in the print editions, in my eyes meaning the print version will fail only after the online version. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was published in print form for the last time on 19 March and Madison's (WI) afternoon newspaper, The Capital Times, has done the same thing.
(http://www.seattlepi.com/business/403793_piclosure17.html and http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/09/business/main3812203.shtml). Other than possibly the major players, I can't see print surviving much longer if technology allows people to be on the internet anywhere and everywhere - which I would suspect isn't too far away. I used to argue that the portability of newspaper was the winner. That's why I buy the Sunday paper. I can take it to the beach and read it. With portable devices and the spread of free wireless Internet, digital newspapers are staking their claim. Still, papers will survive he says.

According to Nicky, the survival of journalism is reliant on journalists asking themselves what their occupation is about. He says we need to go back to the days before PR people outnumbered journalists and start writing news because it is news, not because someone else told us too.
Journalists need to realise that competition amongst journalists isn't the answer, he says. To truly fulfill the role of the fourth estate there needs to be cooperation, not infighting. The latter leads to a reliance on sources, and a journalist which is more akin to a puppet on strings.


I could go further. Nicky said a helluva lot more, which I don't want to attempt to recite. A dictaphone would help.
Although he acknowledged that news journalism has been going down the gurglar a bit, he said the ones who can pull it back out are the journalists - by working together, not against each other, and first of all questioning why they're in the game.
Get rid of the ones who are looking for stardom, keep
the passionate ones and we'll be part way there.


Saturday, April 18, 2009

The beginning

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Do I really want to subscribe to another internet craze which takes up (wastes?) a lot of time? I'll see how I go.
I plan to dedicate this blog to my "guided opinion" (guided by myself only) - my judgement of news and the media mainly, and when that dries up I'll switch to music, problems and whatever else.
Enjoy.

Followers