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That A.C. Newman, he has an enviable work ethic. New TNP album is due May 4th! I presume that’s a USA release date.

Rather excitingly, the recording sessions featured St Vincent, Will Sheff, and slightly less excitingly, the Dap-Kings horns, and Zach Condon. The album title is ‘Together’.

The New Pornographers are due to play this year’s Primavera Sound, although I suspect I will be giving it a miss this time around.

Back at the start of the summer, I went back to Barcelona, for a second visit to the very wonderful Primavera Sound festival. I travelled with the rather pregnant Mrs S., and (Uncle) Danny came along for the latter half of the stay, and also joined us for the festival.

Barcelona is still a marvellous city, and Primavera is still my favourite rock festival. While we were out there, Barcelona FC won the champions league. I can’t pretend that I have any sympathy, interest, or even understanding of football, but I really enjoyed the electric city-wide atmosphere on the day; silent, tense and concentrating, as countless viewers watched the televised match, suddenly punctuated by sighs and unison cheers as chances were missed, and goals won; culminating in the riot of celebration erupting from every door and window onto the streets when the final victory was realised.

The festival was another success. The personal highlight, for me was the chance to finally see Lightning Bolt, unusually for them, an on-stage performance, that was one of the most exhilarating live shows I have ever seen. Shellac, playing again on the same ATP stage as last year, as good value as always, another chance to see Oneida, and sample some of the “heritage” acts, giving it some legend, like Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, and Neil Young. A suprisingly energetic Michael Nyman band set in the indoor auditori was an unexpected highlight, as were a couple of new-to-me performances from Andrew Bird, and Gang Gang Dance. I was amused by Sunn O))), but sadly unable to persuade either of my companions to stay and watch more than ten minutes of their set.

More disappointing were Marnie Stern, who I’d been looking forward to seeing again, seemed to be suffering from terrible sound and equipment problems, Deerhunter transforming a great album into a weak coldplay-lite live experience, an uninspired and frankly routine Art Brut performance, and a generically dull Jarvis set.

It turns out that I edited and uploaded my photos to flickr shortly after returning to the UK, but what with all the busying and rushing around re-organising and home renovating, I seem to have forgotten to switch the set to public, at least until now.

I’ve not posted a gig write up in a long time. One day I might get around to post-documenting some of the backlog. However, here’s something very fresh.

Last night I went to see Fever Ray. Fever Ray is the assumed band name of Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of the strange and compelling Swedish brother-sister art-electronica duo, The Knife.

The ticket price for this one was fairly steep. Seventeen pounds is a lot to ask for an debut act, on a Bristol weekday evening. Knowing the Knife to have something of a penchant for staginess and performance statements, I figured that the cost of admission might indicate a more elaborate performance spectacle than the routine Academy show. It wasn’t a terribly full crowd, which may have also had something to do with the ticket price. Luckily my expectations of an interesting presentation were met, more than satisfactorily.

A stage swathed in as much machine-made fog as I’ve seen since I last watched the Sisters Of Mercy, decades ago. For readers unfamiliar with the Sisters’ stage ouevre, let me clarify; this means a lot of fog. The five-piece band only identifiable as bizarre silhouettes suggestive of a dark circus. Improbably tall hats, shadowy pierrot faces, frock coats, hunched shoulders. Karin, stage center shrouded in an enormous cowled cloak, the headress simultaneously suggesting fur and antlers and briar-hedge basketwork, her peculiar outline only really humanised by oversized white gloved hands. During the second song, she cleverly unfurled her cloak a little, a sudden backlight creating a surprising stained-glass panel effect that seemed to shine from inside her.

The whole performance was a meticulously staged progression, slowly opening up the initial murk. At the start the overhead fog was scissored dramatically by a pair of slow moving laser beams. By the second song, they’d each expanded to a pair of fan shapes. Later on these picked up oscillating movement, and eventually traced out colour shifts in the waves of fog. Within the on-stage gloom, the odd sight of a dozen or so standard-lamps, pulsing away in time to the beats through thick lampshades. I didn’t have my camera with me, although I expect it would have struggled to capture any of this well. Quite a few people have submitted photos of previous shows to flickr.

As the show progressed, the stage was slowly up-lit from the back with soft blue and yellow glows. The cloak was shed, placed on a stand just behind front of stage, it still loomed, like some kind of shadowy spirit-familiar. Gradually we could see a little more of the performers, jigging around, wildly shaking shamanistic totem-sticks, pounding away on congas and toms, yet still the lighting and smoke effects kept them essentially obscured and anonymous.

The short set stuck solidly to the album, without encores, which was fine by me. My attention didn’t wander, nor did I tire of standing in place. My only complaints would be with the slightly murky sound, which isn’t that unusual for the Academy, and that the music didn’t really connect as terribly live, aside from the vocals; pitch-shifted, yet weirdly still human and very real. I think this was probably down to a combination of the very programmed sounds, and the distancing effect of the theatrics. It was something more like watching a stage-show display set to a musical playback, than a rock music show. I took it as an opportunity to watch something a little out of the ordinary, and enjoyed myself.

The album is ace, and I recommend it to anyone. You can find it on spotify.

The video for “Triangle Walks” gives an impression quite close to the live show. There are some other videos available on the band site which give a good sense of the Fever Ray aesthetic.

Triangle Walks from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

Eddie Argos, of Art Brut fame, and Mikey Georgeson a.k.a. Mr. Solo a.k.a. Vessel from David Devant and his Spirit Wife have formed themselves a glam rock band – Glam Chops.

Even better, their first release is a Christmas single : ‘Countdown to Christmas / Baby Jesus was the first Glam Rocker’. Better still, they’ve made it available as a free download ‘as an antidote to the credit crunch’. It sounds pretty much like you’d expect, and the first listen brought a seasonal smile to my face.

I’ve only just noticed, but the Matador Records sampler disc ‘Intended Play: Fall 2008′, which they have made available as a free download, has a sample track from A.C. Newman’s forthcoming ‘Get Guilty’. Unsurprisingly, I like it. There’s some good stuff on the rest of the album too, well worth the download cost.

As I mentioned earlier, just as I was preparing to head out for Release the Bats, an email came in advertising a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated, world-exclusive, miss-it-at-your-peril set of performances by a reformed Sleep, at one of next May’s ATP weekenders.

Now I’m old and cynical enough to realise that very few things are truly never-to-be-repeated one-off exclusive shows in the world of Rock n’ Roll, but I am keen on Sleep, and ATP surely know how to run a memorable event. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of one of their Minehead weekends, it seems eminently possible that it’s a great deal more civilised than the more traditional tents, rain, and cider circuit. It didn’t take me that long to make the plunge and book a chalet for two. Team Strickland are going to Butlins!

Aside from Sleep on the bill, we have long-time house favourites Spiritualized, crazy art-rockers Devo, experimental hip-hoppists AntiPop consortium, post-punk legends Young Marble Giants, and several others I don’t yet know adjectives for. The more interesting thing about the lineup is the fact that 50% of the lineup will be chosen by popular vote by the ticket purchasers. That means me!

There’s a cunning twist. No doubt intended to mix things up, and keep it fresh. You’re not permitted to vote for acts that have played an ATP UK festival before, at least not initially. This makes life decidedly more tricky. Lots of my no-brainer instant first choices are on the exclusion list. I shall have to work a little harder.

dEUS and A.C. Newman have to be definite votes. St. Vincent would be good. Angels of Light, Midlake, Wolf Parade, Swan Lake ? Ratatat ? Sufjan might be a populist choice. I’d love to see Morton Valence again. Black Affair or the Aliens? Maybe I could gamble a vote on a reformed Beta Band. Decisions, decisions…

David Cross was in the New Pornographers promo video for ‘Use It.’ When I went to see David Cross curate his cabaret show last year in London, one of the acts presented was Kristen Schall, who showed a film from her ongoing‘Penelope Princess of Pets’ series. Now TNP have a video for Mutiny, I Promise you, featuring Penelope Princess of Pets.

It’s all linked. I henceforth predict the Flight of the Conchords will support the forthcoming A.C. Newman tour.

Kate was right, that’s clearly a cardboard theremin. Not often you get to say that.

Apple released iTunes version 8 this week, which introduced some excellent new features, such as Genius playlists, but broke the fancy perl script that I wrote to rotate my music library on my iPod touch.

While revisiting this, I took the opportunity to re-implement it, aiming to fix a few of it’s faults, most specifically the terrible performance. I decided to use Python this time around, chiefly because of the existence of appscript, an apple event bridge with a nice syntax. Python’s object and sequence semantics are a slightly better fit with AppleScript’s data models, and appscript should be a more optimal solution than Mac::Glue for sending lots of messages iteratively.

I’ve also improved the actual command recipe, using ‘duplicate’ rather than ‘add’ to build the playlist seems more efficient. Also the overhead of having to periodically build glue modules with the ‘gluemac‘ tool is removed. Sadly appscript isn’t shipped with OS X, but installing it ( at least on Leopard ), is as simple as ‘sudo easy_install appscript‘.

The concept behind the tool is the same : use a nominated playlist to synchronise the albums with the iPod, and pick a random set of albums from buckets organised by album rating. Currently it’s set to shuffle in 10 ‘2 star’ albums, 20 ‘three star’ albums, and 30 ‘four star’ albums, selected from a ‘just music’ smart playlist that filters the master library, removing all spoken word, and podcasts and other miscellany from the pool.

Here’s the source. I’m far less experienced at python than I am perl, so I wouldn’t claim it was a particularly idiomatic solution. It does run many times more quickly than the perl / Mac::Glue solution, taking a minute or so, rather than the best part of an hour. I would put all the performance gains down to the AppleEvents bridge , appscript interface, and using more efficient apple event set operations, rather than iterating over individual data.

As rumoured, it seems that Carl Newman is working on a second solo project. Fingers crossed, hoping there will be a UK tour to support it.

An excellent festival. More completely organised than I expected. This came to prominence straight away, when a rather spacey lady handling our tickets failed to give us one of the essential ID cards that pair up with the wristband to allow entry and re-entry. A security guard stopped us from heading back in to point out the error. Anticipating anguish at the gate, and hoping that a single card and a friendly attitude might get us through, we were met by a super-friendly chap, speaking perfect English, who whisked us back to the check-in, where we waited for the woman to confirm that her stack of cards and tickets were out by one, and furnished us with the missing card. And then we were in. Things do not run that smoothly at Glastonbury when your credentials go awry!

The venue is good, purpose built, although admittedly it does have a slight air of NCP car park to it. There are three amphitheatres with banked steps of seating set facing out to sea. These make up the RockDelux, ATP and the VICE stages. The other two stages, namely the CD Drome, and the Estrella Damm stage are set up on the main paved area that links the first three, with the food market between them. There are two gigantic arrays of solar cells, apparently the largest in Europe, which at least made a handy shelter during the couple of light rain showers, even if they sadly aren’t used to directly power the festival itself. There is also an indoor concert hall, the Auditori, which I didn’t manage to set foot inside once, a combination of not being nearby when anything compelling was happening there, plus not quite being able to figure out where the entrance actually was!

The festival runs over several days, Thursday to Saturday, and keeps to a gruelling schedule, starting at four or five p.m., and running through till four or five a.m the next morning. It’s really all about the music, as there is little else to do onsite, other than browse a few T-shirt and record label stalls, eat functional outdoor food, or drink expensive sponsor beer from plastic cups.

It’s far less wear upon the legs and feet than the typical British festival, the proximity of the stages, along with the near-universal seating, and paved footpaths rather than clogging mud fields thankfully mean that it’s just the marathon running time contributing to your fatigue, not trudging miles around countryside inbetween sets. The climate was pleasantly appropriate, a few spots of light rain but it was mild enough to be comfortable in light clothing all the way through the evening, so you could just stick to the basic set of clothes you came in wearing, not wrestle with lugging around cumbersome outfit changes to cater to changes in the weather.

It may be just a result of the lack of crowding, but the toilet facilites were fine, little queuing, and freshly clean each day. I recommend taking a little dispenser of handwash gel, you can pick these up in the chemists nowadays.

Another benefit of the close site is the number of acts you can practically watch. As the stages are just separated by a minute or two’s easy stroll you can mix and match to take in as much, or as little of a set as you fancy. It’s quite possible to watch the start of one artist’s set for a couple of songs, and then wander around another three stages watching a couple of numbers at each, and still return to the start to catch the final few of the original. This all makes it incredibly easy to sample new or interesting acts on spec without having to miss out on much if any of your must-see sets. Over the three days we easily managed to see dozens of acts, with comparatively little effort.

It would take too long to run through them all in detail, so I’ll just group the highlights into some buckets.

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