first word on greenbelt - coldcut were stunning - and certainly better than the last time i saw them in london. a few video clips here. there was a devastating version of 'the lunatics have taken over the asylum' but my phone was acting up so i just had to give it my unmediated attention. run dmc, 'paid in full', rage against the machine featured too.
definitely the highest point of the festival - all downhill from here.
all the stuff about this year's glastonbury this weekend made me put my 2002 photos up on flickr
must go again some day [hopefully a dry year]. might have done so by now if getting tickets weren't such a scramble - you have to be determined to go.
some dj shadow movies from friday night at brixton academy:
Download walkietalkie.3GP
Download circleline.3GP
Download thistime.3GP
Download mashing.3GP
Download midnight.3GP
i've got a new phone so these are small but decent and you can hear the music - can anyone identify the track on the movie i've called circleline [because it's shot on the circle line]? mashing features lateef rapping on the stage and great audience participation. midnight is shadow closing the show over 'midnight in a perfect world'.
shadow still has an endearing slight lack of cool on stage - i like him better for it because it feels like we get the man not a distancing persona. gareth was surprised by the talking, but shadow talked to the crowd far less than in 2003. still we mocked: "stand away from the mic!" and spoke of sermons in the church of dj shadow. but he left it to lateef to address us at length.
it was great to hear the unkle tracks given a proper run - a soundtrack to better times. some people are surprised by the rap-heavy turn on 'the outsider', but if you've got the quannum/solesides stuff it's always been there, just not on the albums under his own name. with all its guests and styles the outsider feels like shadow's own attempt at an unkle album. musically he's got quite a range.
visuals all fantastic but the thing that sticks in my mind is the cctv cameras clip for 'triplicate' which fortunately is on the dvd with the outsider special edition. one for grace sometime.
...were holy
photos here. this is a good one to view as a slideshow since there are 46 photos taken from the beginning to the end of the gig [the last photo is the end of the last song]. wish flickr did full-screen size slideshows. you need the full size to feel like you were there.
there's a lot of comment about madonna charging £80-160 per seat for her UK dates. but it's a free market, the tickets are selling out, so good luck to her.
the thing i admire about madonna is her survival instinct. whenever her career is on the slide through poor product and bad choices, she pulls her act together and does what she has to do - make a great pop album. and lo and behold, she's the woman of the moment again - this time, at a point where she could reasonably have let it go. that commands my respect.
and looking like that at her age too. whatever did she do? that ass is a masterpiece of taxidermy.
now that it's arrived, here's the video clip of people dancing to the happy bullets
Download 12-03-06_0514.3gp
the happy bullets last night. enjoyed it, bought the cd. 60s-inspired indie pop. they make a great racket for five people. 
above, daniel photographs/worships the happy bullets.
am waiting for the video footage off my phone to show up in my mailbox. i find phone messages to email tend to get lost at random.
dan hughes joined us for the evening, a pleasure to see him again.
bar camp in the afternoon . couldn't think of enough tags to write on my pass at the door. emerging church and architecture, but i didn't want to be limited to those. i had to go and look at my 'about' page to remember what i'm interested in. my blog is external memory. a mcluhanite extension of self.
thursday night was at cargo for coldcut's album launch. it's one of my favourite venues, you've seen it in the 'church as third place' collage [the loving couple and beer images] and elsewhere on smallritual v3 because it would make a great church.
in the original version of the collage, below, there's a third view of cargo mid-right, and a guy looking out from a red background scanned from a magazine. he's mike ladd, and he was one of the rappers for coldcut on thursday. it was weird [but great] to see part of my collage come true.
here's more cargo - the bar, actually:
jonny, joel and simon:
and coldcut - well one of them's visible behind robert owens:
let's try inserting video clips:
Download 19-01-06_2253.3gp
mike ladd and juice doing some blazing freestyle rapping - best part of the evening?
Download 19-01-06_2223.3gp
robert owens and friend
Download 19-01-06_2139.3gp
just coldcut
please excuse or mute the awful sound, that's what you get from a phone! way too loud for it to cope.
btw coldcut wanted people to take clips on their phones and send them in to be used for a video project. i hope they got better ones than these.
just back from the sell-out sigur ros concert at brixton academy. the four group members were joined on stage by a string quartet and brass band to realise their sonically ambitious compositions. the result was more like an avant-garde classical concert than anything else - easy to imagine this at the royal festival hall. one piece stopped in the middle for a minute or two of complete silence - a challenge to an audience to understand what's going on and wait. only a few broke the silence but the tension could be felt - were we getting this right? some quite formidable musicianship on display - the first time i can recall seeing all live instruments at brixton academy. no laptops on stage or mixers! you hear a sound and lo and behold, someone is actually playing it! unfamiliar territory. in that sense it was more impressive than just hearing the albums, where one assumes it's all done in a computer and everything is possible. but here the fades, tempo changes, 'digital' effects were played before our eyes. very impressive indeed.
visually it was fairly simple - the stage, musicians, some lighting effects and enigmatic projections [a bit like their album graphics] on a backdrop. but the last track - piece one should say - was a stunning coup de theatre. a white screen came down in front of the musicians, who were then silhouetted against it or visible through it as the lighting shifted. add the projections on the backdrop and overlay with intense fast-cutting projections on the front drop and the band are inside their own three-dimensional video, flickering faster and faster in an astounding assault on the senses. standing ovation results.
random thoughts:
if this is what can be done with some brass, some strings, a glockenspiel and a piano, why are church and school bands so unambitious?
[just as smile-era beach boys makes one wonder about possibilities for church choirs]
me and gareth were put in mind of the 1960s classical avant-garde - sigur ros music [cello bow on electric guitar and all] was probably done in some happening in 1965 attended by three people. and everyone laughed at them and said it'll get nowhere. and forty years later the queue is literally round the block.
we've gone full circle - from live musicians, to studio effects that couldn't be played live, to computers, to live musicians producing sounds one thought were made by computers.
would it have the same credibility if they were singing in welsh? ;)
my friend russ jones who co-runs future world funk is ill, so last saturday's fwf was his last gig for a while. i went along to say hi, there's some pics in the photo list. they were taken on my new mobile phone - not too bad.
the guest dj was from miami, he was supposed to do latin but instead played an electro set. now i love electro, but only hear a good set at five year intervals, so this was fine by me. but i was thinking, i remember dancing to this record in a london club in 1986. and then i realised that half the people on the dancefloor with me were babies back then...
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