Samstag, November 25, 2006

trip to cologne

last weekend i went to cologne to visit some friends of mine. here's everything music-related that happened to me:

on friday night my friend and i found out that we had missed jimi tenor - who had performed at the stadtgarten cologne on the very same day. i was not sad or so, i had had the opportunity to see him live in berlin, as well. but i like him.

roaming through the streets at night we found a music store selling this:



for whoever might be interested in sounding like eric clapton...

rather nice was to find out there is this bar in cologne:


and to find out you can buy an elvis for your decoration:



well, i also went to a gorgeous party called superconnected in a very nice place, rose club.

my friends also turned me into moloko this weekend, by showing my a video collection and an amazing live dvd.

Donnerstag, November 23, 2006

must try harder

some trivia.

MUST TRY HARDER: NEVER HAD A UK NUMBER ONE

Band
James Brown
Depeche Mode
Morrissey
Bob Dylan
Public Enemy
The Cure
Basement Jaxx
The Who
Radiohead


Highest UK singles chart position
5 (Living in America, 1986)
4 (People are People, 1984)
3 (You Have Killed Me, 2006)
4 (Like A Rolling Stone, 1965)
16 (He Got Game, 1998)
5 (Lullaby, 1989)
4 (Rendez-Vous, 1994)
2 (I'm A Boy, 1966)
3 (Paranoid Android, 1997)


i took this from dummymag newsletter.

Dienstag, November 21, 2006

Robosonic Mashup-Mixes

Recently stumbled over two guys from Berlin called "Robosonic" who are doing minimal electro-tech-stuff as well as playing mash-up-nights all over the world. Their myspace-page offers two sets for download and I urge you to grab those. Mash-up at its best, all from 80s, hiphop, house/tech-stuff over to metal, it's a wild ride.

download set1
download set2

And while you are at it, make friends with them.

Sonntag, November 19, 2006

tribute records II

yes, no need to explain anything. the pj harvey tribute cd was just as bad as i expected it to be. but i think i found something even worse:

have a look at this offer:



click on the picture and read the comments, this is entertainment!

tribute records

a friend of mine is crazy about pj harvey, in the sense of being highly addicted. he has all her cds, some posters, buttons and t-shirts and a 6 dvd collection of music videos, live performances and tv interviews of her.

but i found something in a shop he definitely doesn't have yet: a wacky tribute cd called little fish (no, it is too old to try to make some extra money by a big fish reference). a tribute to polly jean harvey it says in a very cheapish font on a very cheapish version of some portrait of a lady by pablo picasso. (pj - the jumbled artist?). the whole thing is released by doppelganger records - how many more hints do we need to know about how this is gonna sound like?

but let me give you the track list:
01 back burner dress
02 n. titty down by the water
03 army of half wits c'mon billy
04 stretches of the famous send his love to me
05 johnny bic yuri g
06 p.w. (h)ell rid of me
07 mission statement water
08 dork 50ft queenie
09 lucy sheila na gig
10 vee dry

i haven't been listening to it yet, neither did i open the package and have a look at the booklet. but i am already wondering what there is to expect from a band called dork and what kind of polly doppelganger someone called lucy might me.

well, my friend's coming round on tuesday night and we'll give this record a spin. it had cost one euro, i'm sure it'll be worth every penny. i'll keep you updated!

Samstag, November 18, 2006

george michael



i am not in this picture.


i got into george michael in 1996, when he released his "comeback" album older. let me just write a brief history of his musical life to let you understand who george michael actually is:
george michael started his career as one part of the 80's boy band duo wham, which actually weren't that much "boy band" at all. the guys were friends from school, not a casted ensemble, even back then george michael wrote all songs, instead of having a producer doing this for them. they even had two girls, shirley and pepsi , as background singers and dancers, and they were friends and regular members of the band.
george michael wrote careless whisper all by himself, being only 18 years old, and it's not a kitsch-ladden love song, but an attempt to express failure in a relationship, with one amazing sax solo in it.
then he grew up and went solo, becoming one of the most mega-selling artists of the early nineties with his album faith. its sucessor listen without prejudice seems like a renunciation to the music business, and after this record, george michael had to deal with personal struggles.
older is like him rising from the ashes of his old past, a grown-up, mature george michael with songs that were both loved by the audience and the critics. although i made myself familiar with his complete bio and discography later, songs from older, songs like jesus to a child, star people or spinning the wheel still are the cream of the crop for me.

older is one of the ten records i would take with me, if i had to go and spend the rest of my life on a deserted island (you know these kind of mind-games..). so naturally i would have wanted to see him perform live at one time or another. then he stated he would not tour anymore. then he announced his greatest hits tour. i bought my ticket on the very first day they were sold. i waited for months.

i didn't go. i skipped one of my favourit artists for going abroad to see a friend and go to a concert that consisted of a movie and three songs sung by one band i've only recently started to admire and have already seen live this year.

maybe i just don't like these grand mega shows and rather chose a cosy concert instead. what's the point in seeing george michael when, at no time during the concert, i get the chance to smile at him to make him see how much i enjoy his show?
i do not at all regret missing his show. but i thought i'd let you know i am thinking about it nevertheless.

robotron and maria's radio

yesterday i went to see a friends' friends' band...nobody in our group really knew what they sounded like and what was to be expected. well, nobody would have expected this.

the mentioned band was called maria's radio, apparently a group of friends from school from a surburban area of berlin. this sounds cliche-ish, but they were in fact very good. one singer wore a chapeau clappe and long hair, looking like he just jumped out of one of the latest replay commercials, the other one wore a furry coat, appearing to be a bit more rebellious. the bass player was a cute, very small girl and the second guitar player the afforementioned friends' friend. (i didn't see the drummer). their music had a kind of psychedelic sixties appeal, they even had long blues-ish guitar parts. definitely a band with the potential to release a record!

it's sad the bad things have to be the highlight of this blog, but i just have to write about the band that preceded maria's radio: robotron were suggested as support act by the guitarist of maria's radio, so i was told, and wondering about what had gotten into him was just one of the many things we wondered about last night.
robotron had two people on stage, a guitar player in normal jeans and t-shirt, with the usual indie kid hair-do and, most importantly, a sane behaviour.
his counterpart on vocals was the exact opposite. this guy wore a brown mechanic's overall, a green scarf and bicycle helmet, and extremly big sunglasses. nothing wrong with that, people in recent tv reports about the latest band from nyc look exactly the same. neither did the fact that he took off the helmet to reveal a mullet with shaved parts in it shock me, not at all the fact that under his overall he wore a dirty old singlet with robotron written on it, plus fishnet stockings with an extremely short glittering mini skirt. i actually do respect that, having the guts to perform like this, in a small bar in front of very few people who were all square in the "we-are-fucking-cool"-way of thinking.
the thing that bothered me, and seemingly everybody else, was that their music was just so bad! every song consisted of guitar sounds, which, would they have been played with a "band", would actually have shown talent. but here we had those guitar sounds alone, without any consistency or change in rhythm, very sporadically accompanied by one or two hits on an electronical drum device (the singer, apparently, had no sense of rhythm). he started his performance with screaming loudly: "aaaaaah". and it was not like he tried to make this fit the melody or rhythm of the music, he simply, monotonously screamed. lyrics, when there were any, were impossible to understand. but i do recall they did a cover version of the kinks' you really got me.
a clever idea it was, actually, to offer figs to make the audience come closer to the stage, but how stupid it was to throw it at them later.
the whole show lasted about 45 minutes and i can't tell how many song they played, because each and every single on of them really sounded exactly the same.

robotron and maria's radio were like different poles last night and it actually is a shame that the second band was very good, but the first one will be subject of a story i can tell for the rest of my life.

Sonntag, November 05, 2006

music to read: lost in music

i am currently reading lost in music by giles smith - a british guy who grew up in the 70s and played in some bands but never really became successful. it's an autobiographical story about his various encounters with pop music.

a very funny episode, roughly translated from my mind:

when i was about 14 or 15, in the mid-seventies, my older brother asked me to play in the band he was currently in because they had dropped their keyboarder. after a while we thought about letting our third brother join as well, but realised this would be too weird - we might become a band that only consists of brothers, like the jackson 5. my mom fooled around one morning at the breakfast table, saying we should name our band 'the smiths'. our response was a short laugh, followed by "we don't think there will ever be a band that could be successful with a name like the smiths..."

Freitag, November 03, 2006

Laurent Garnier in my Hometown

Laurent Garnier is DJing in my hometown this saturday and I would love to go there, but ... The club where this is going to happen is not very big and they anticipate alot of possible visitors, which leads to the crazy situation that there is currently a kind of lottery for the sheer possibility to buy tickets. You need to write them an email and then get an answer if you are allowed to come by on saturday and buy a ticket. Which is way too much hassle for me, also this means that the club will be packed with people and the evening will not be too pleasant.

However, this is kinda disappointing for me because I would really love to see him. For years now I did stay away from evenings with "famous" DJs or "famous" musicians DJing in clubs because I had a few rather boring nights which is especially bad if you pay alot of money. The problem is basically that they are mostly not better or different from most other DJs, sometimes they are even worse.
There are only a few people left that I would really pay alot of money to see DJing, those include DJ Koze, DJ Shadow, RJD2, Bad Boy Bill and a few other. Laurent Garnier is on that list too, but it seems I will just pass on that opportunity.

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