Technolust

New Blog: Geist Bites

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Dear friends, followers, countrymen, and similar,

While I have contacted some of you individually about my new blog, Geist Bites, it's probably easier and more efficient to write a post directing all of you towards it. However, when I'm a place with half-decent internet, I'll try to get round to writing to everybody.

Technolust has run its course, it's been very difficult to juggle schoolwork, attempting to write anything for magazines and this blog all at once. The 'putting things in scare quotes' manouevre has gotten very old very quickly, too.

As a result, I'm going to make my life much easier and update a smarter, sexier blog regularly and succinctly. The content is largely the same, it's just going to be better. Simple.

http://geistbites.wordpress.com

Have a read: if you like what you see, subscribe and, if you're feeling generous, spread the word!

Bombay Bicycle Club - 'Flaws'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Another crafty cross-post from the good people at PopMatters.

Named after a bourgeois curry franchise, Bombay Bicycle Club made quite a stir a few years ago with EPs The Boy I Used to Be and How We Are. These records issued the band’s signature sound, and were as creamy white and tempered as those restaurants’ interiors. There was a politeness to them, perhaps a lack of bite. It turns out that this has been the band’s staple ever since, but there was also a restless creativity to those EPs that helped to push them to the top of the UK Indie Charts.

There was just a dash of unaffected attitude to them, so Bombay Bicycle Club’s current reluctance to rock out hints at a self-serious sophistication, a stand-in for the squealing noise made by their many peers. Nevertheless, these early records were lovely. Pinned by vocalist and guitarist Jack Steadman’s quivering, pining voice, they told of a maturity and a dynamism that reached far beyond their 16 years.

They carried those records’ best songs—“The Hill”, “Sixteen”, and “Ghost”—into last year’s debut, I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose. It was, perhaps, less successful than their avid fan base had hoped, and it met mixed reviews. It was also a slow burner, and it was easy to mistake this for their being tedious, or having simply not applied enough thrust to their music. However, there were occasions on this record when they threatened to burst, to make good on their promising teenage kicks. Yet they largely kept it restrained, so these moments of overdrive were merely points of punctuation. The new material failed to match the old and, excepting “Dust on the Ground”, “What If”, and lead single “Always Like This”, it wasn’t an easy album to love. Only the album closer, “The Giantess”, hinted at the band’s new folk-based direction, and even that was kitted with an electronic beat.

To support I Had the Blues, Bombay Bicycle Club played a series of acoustic showcases. They are continuing to do this to support Flaws. At those gigs, the band’s singular, devastating flaw became apparent: the star of Bombay Bicycle Club is Jack Steadman. The rest of the band are certainly competent, but Steadman combines the songwriting engine, the vocal force, and the instrumental prowess to shine brighter than the rest of them combined. It’s likely that he’ll go solo at some point, and it’s likely that this will be successful. It’s also likely that Flaws was made largely at his command.

Flaws is the loveliest sound of a band totally losing the plot. While still polite, the band are earthier, more pastoral, but they sound a little homeless. Perhaps they can’t decide if they’re from the deep South, the Midwest, or from deep within the English countryside. Perhaps they’re equally as trapped by the calloused fingertips of folk as they are the grubby fingernails of post-punk.

Of course, Steadman dominates. He leads the band through the plains of “Dust on the Ground”, borrowed from I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose. He also makes them wait at the crossroads of “Leaving Blues”. Surprisingly, it’s not a Leadbelly cover. It is, however, utterly, devastatingly, beautiful.

The album’s sense of displacement—geographically; from the band’s back catalogue; from the expectations of genre confines and pigeonholes—makes it a confusing whole. The triplets of “Ivy and Gold” and “My God” make way for gorgeous vocal harmonies, and “Rinse Me Down” is both open and intimate. However, Flaws suffers because there’s little in the way of logical progression between it and its predecessors. Bombay Bicycle Club’s move from indie belligerence to bucolic folk doesn’t signal a development in their sound. Instead, it just seems like they’re being inconstant. Only on closer “Swansea” does the band branch out, embellishing their sound with keyboards and drums treated with dollops of reverb. Perhaps where “The Giantess” indicated their move towards folk, “Swansea” indicates their move towards mournful psychedelic pop. Its drones are layered and there’s an interesting interplay between electronic and organic sound. It would be very interesting to hear Bombay Bicycle Club explore this sound further.

It’s far more original then any of their previous efforts. However, where Flaws diverges so far from what we expect, it’s likely that any further experimentation would make the band lose focus entirely.

6/10

Extra! Extra! Read it here.

Bombay Bicycle Club playing 'Rinse Me Down'. Lovely, isn't it?

Kele - 'The Boxer'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:00:00 +0000

The second in the last few weeks' crossposts from Popmatters, with many more yet to come. This is of Kele's recent album The Boxer.

People used to buy physical copies of records. This process, known then as the music business, involved exchanging hard currency for acetate or vinyl. It was intimately connected to the record stores in which this took place processing and pigeonholing bands for commercial purposes. However, by the early ‘90s, bands were blurring the lines between music in the rock/pop sections and the dance/electronic sections of these record stores. On a mainstream level that was very commercially appealing. Bloc Party were a part of this, too, helping to demolish indie kids’ prejudices towards dance music, and perhaps even towards dancing itself. They also performed several spectacular ram-raids on the charts with killer singles like “Helicopter”, “Banquet”, and, more recently, “Flux”.

Bloc Party broke ground by making likable, acute, music that was radio-ready and had big pop hooks. By drawing on influences like Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Wire, they opened up people’s ears to the post-punk past. By allowing electronically-inclined produces to remix their songs, they made the dance floor accessible to people who formed opinions about music in the aftermath of ‘90s superclub culture. They gave everyone from music obsessives to passive consumers something to think and talk about, too.

The band’s hiatus after the release of 2008’s Intimacy gave Bloc Party’s frontman, Kele Okereke, the time to move to Berlin, and work with producers XXXChange and Hudson Mohawke in New York. In that time, Kele beefed up and made his sound more muscular, too.

On The Boxer, Kele has made a record from solid gold beats and squelching synths. It splatters, full of processed clunks and an air of intensity different to Bloc Party’s brooding anthems. This is the central point of difference between Kele’s solo output and that of Bloc Party. Where the latter were, defiantly, a rock band who dabbled with electronics, Kele’s music begins from a position of pure eclecticism and spreads outward.

The Boxer’s biggest hitters are its first three tracks, “Walk Tall”, “On the Lam”, and “Tenderoni”. Disappointingly, they are heavy-handed where they need to be just heavy. Meanwhile, tracks like “The New Rules” and “All The Things I Could Never Say” are half-hearted when they should be full-blooded. It’s not clear whether it’s greater or lesser than the sum of its parts, because the math just doesn’t add up: it equates inner-city dubstep sounds with gentrified electro and globalized percussion, and it all sounds scrubbed up and sanitized.
If Kele’s been digging the crates, his findings sound more like he’s been tearing leaves out of textbooks than concocting theories and baffling us with a fevered imagination. It sounds like he’s been doing calculations and drawing graphs on his influences’ effectiveness rather than hammering his musical loves relentlessly.

“Tenderoni” is a buzzing club banger, sure, but its overhanging hook tries too hard to sound authentically housey. It’s not deep or resonant enough to match the dubstep it so wants to emulate, either. However, the martial opener, “Walk Tall”, drills and demands attention, complete with a creeped-out anti-chorus. “On the Lam”, meanwhile, sounds like a combination of uplifting ‘90s house, the brutal hardcore of that same period, with a contemporary sheen borrowed from Timbaland and Skream.

The Boxer is a thicker, heavier, version of the sort of music DFA were putting out almost 10 years ago. It doesn’t sound dated, but it does sound like Kele’s waited a long time to have his way and apply lessons that he learned during the early days of Bloc Party on his own terms. However, the album he’s made is much more successful when bent on making bodies jump, as his chaotic live sets have proved. As a result, the album isn’t particularly lovable, but it isn’t an artistic failure, either. Where The Boxer gobbles up contemporary music and spits it back out, hopefully, Kele will refine his palate for future offerings to turn out something more solid and consistent.

You can read this review here. Have a look; if you give them hits, they feel like kisses.

This is the video for 'Tenderoni', The Boxer's lead single.

Robert Downey Jr. in 'Less Than Zero'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:49:00 +0000

This is a craftily crossed-post of my contribution to PopMatters' 100 Essential Film Performances 2010. Mine is about Robert Downey Jr. in Less Than Zero:

In written form, Less Than Zero is a thing of brusque cruelty. Its cinematic counterpart is icier, but its frenzied sentimentality is maybe a little more human. The book’s characters are faceless blurs, captured in stark, clear, English. Their screen personae, however, are clearly frail and fractured. The film depicts real youth with unreal privilege. It’s a neon flood of gauche fashion and loud music, almost unbearably rooted to its time. However, it continues to be relevant: it’s visually startling and undercut with trauma. The story deals with the tension between extreme and grave events and the null interior lives to whom these events happen. This performance by Downey Jr., as the troubled Julian, succeeds because he captures how important these events seem to be to young lives. He’s sometimes zany, juvenile, jovial, but he’s set in a deep gloom. The film tracks Julian’s descent from grinning boyhood into gurning, sweating, addiction and prostitution until his redemption in death.

In the film’s opening scene, at his high school graduation, he’s all charm: a nostalgic smile at his father, a genial, audacious, kiss on Clay’s mother’s cheek. However, the change in Julian is evident in Clay’s flashbacks, where he is brasher, garrulously-clad, talking about “high IQ pussy”. By his appearance at the ‘Fuckmas’ party, he’s volatile and nervous and his eyes are wider, wilder. Downey Jr. punctuates Julian’s terrible scenario with sincere gestures of dented worry, mirroring his own addiction. A tragic success.

You can read the rest of this year's selection of performances here.

This is Less Than Zero's trailer. Please forgive it for having not dated particularly well.

The-Dream - 'Yamaha'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:00:00 +0000

This is the video to The-Dream's 'Yamaha' (and 'Nikki' and 'Abyss'). It came out a while ago, so this post is a little late.

Like Alicia Keys' 'Have You Ever Tried Sleeping With A Broken Heart', 'Yahama' has clearly plundered Prince's royal archives and bolstered his findings with a wall of keyboards. It's romantic, yet still contains the word 'motherfucker'. Where those keyboards deliver distinctly '80s signifiers, it has about four solid gold hooks littered throughout the song.

It's romantic enough to directly address a young lady whose name is still tattooed to our protagonist's back. Its come-ons are oversexed and undercut with melancholy and it's got enough drifting power to romanticise things out in the big, wide, world too like running for the hills and escaping the cops.

For the rest of us, 'Yamaha' is the sound of lifting your hands, or poking your head, out of a big, bad, Corvette so everyone can see what bliss it is to be young and sharply dressed. It's the sort of thing you can imagine being brought to the screen by a kinder Michael Mann.

The xx - 'Shelter' (John Talabot's Feel It Too remix)

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:15:00 +0000

Shelter (John Talabot's Feel it too Remix) by John Talabot

The one contributor here at 'Technolust towers' really likes The xx. You can tell because s/he wrote a really earnest review of their self-titled debut album about a year ago.

This is John Talabot's remix of 'Shelter', one of the most poignant cuts from that record. It was featured on Pitchfork's Forkcast yesterday. Previously, Talabot has reworked Delorean's 'Seasun' to great effect, but more on that later.

This remix makes a 'moody and protective' song remeniscent of the 'urban experience' sound as smooth, shimmering, and buoyant as a Balaeric summer. It sounds a bit like Hans Zimmer's plucky, clunky, xylophonic soundtrack to Tony Scott's romance-on-the-run True Romance.

"It's Alive!"

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

And so we witness the invention, the essence, of a horror movie archetype.

More on this at a later date.

Efdemin - 'Chicago'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:23:00 +0000

This is a crosspost of a review I wrote for Popmatters, which you can read here.
Chicago is the third most populous city in the United States. That population is very diverse. This means that the city has its own cultural platform, providing slices of thoroughbred Americana in its own distinct way. Indeed, it has all the ingredients that outisiders associate with New York. Both betray a tough, photogenic romance that it is ripe for local pride and those outsiders’ distant sentiments.
Chicago can also be recognized as the birthplace of modern electronic dance music. Interestingly, it is reported that a demanding Sun Ra once told his musicians that he would replace them with the drum machines pioneered in the city if they didn’t play to his liking. Further more, despite the rage evident on the city’s Disco Demolition Night, the Chicago house scene of the mid-1980s broke musical and cultural boundaries, bringing together men and women, black and white, and gay and straight, in a flurry of non-stop ecstatic dancing and drug taking.

When exported to Europe, Ibiza and, by 1988, to the British countryside, this became a revolution in popular culture, a challenge to Thatcher, which owed a great deal to the ethos of the 1960s. The movement, however, suffered from serious side-effects. One, a charming, if platitudinous, pseudo-spiritual gumption about unity. Two, the Criminal Justice Bill, which streamlined the movement into a money-making machine and spurred British superclub culture until its demise at the start of the 21st century. The children of methamphetamine woke up the next morning with mild, aimless depression.

Chicago is Efdemin’s second LP. His output is diverse, cerebral, and progressive. It is open to headphone honchos, but, equally at home on the dancefloor, it’s never self-serious or too satisfied with its own intelligence. There is, however, a central conflict between the album’s title and its content, a clear contradiction between directly referring to the Windy City, with all its cultural connotations and the city’s pivotal place in the history of electronic dance music, and being encased in a distinctly German minimalist aesthetic. Nevertheless, ‘Chicago’ seems to allude to a more general urban experience.

Like the cities we live in, the album is at times claustrophobic and oppressive. Moments of clarity are interrupted by a variety of distractions. Here, these take the form of detuned synth stabbings, hollow sirens, or the caffeinated jitter of run-on beats. On “Shoeshine”, these distractions are organic, more to do with human faculties than the machines that regulate our lives. Here, close interaction between percussion and jazz-inspired cymbal play contests the rigid, compressed, electronic drum structures. The album is full of crevices, back alleys, and unkempt hallways, as on opener “Cowbell” or “Oh My God”. The former is a murder mystery of a track, sheathed in the city’s smog that obscures our exploration. It is permeated by warped vibes playing far removed from the joy usually associated with the instrument. The latter creeps through the city, a strolling jazz suite, in search of things that crawl. It is eventually undercut by a busker’s mournful playing.

Indeed, on Chicago, Efdemin depicts a city of burst pipes and open windows that reveal its citizens’ taste in music without ever creating a clichéd period piece about run-down tenements or gun-wielding gangsters. The album invites the listener to take part in the musical experience, yet it conceals much of its intentions. At 76 minutes, this means that getting inside Chicago isn’t easy work.

"Night Train”, however, takes the familiarity of the trans-European express adventure, the concentric, circular, rhythms of travel, and applies it to something newer, faster, and shinier. The sonorous pop that punctuates the track is always another landmark passed and forgotten. Its polyrhythms are always the hypnosis of routine. Ultimately, it implies that, like many albums of this ilk, and many albums created by Efdemin’s contemporaries, Chicago is well, if not best, suited to soundtracking travel.

Overall, while the energy required to fully appreciate the scope of the record is likely to be too much for too many people, Chicago is certainly a success. It’s more secluded and subtle than Efdemin’s self-titled debut and, where ‘Lohn & Brot’ or ‘Le Ratafia’ from that record were instantly accessible without forfeiting their intelligence, Chicago, as a whole, internalizes its melodic intentions. Chicago’s vision is more sustained, subtle, and stately. It asks questions while taking us on a guided tour of our own cities. This, itself, will prompt further questions, further investigation, and further interest in urbanism.

Ad On A Bus Shelter

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:21:00 +0000


H&M bikini advert from 2008

'CLUB MED - LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE: White sand, turquoise water, caramel flesh. Thanks very much for reminding us. A cold drizzle falling here in Manhattan; a malevolent cloud has swallowed the tops of the Trade Centre Towers'

Jay McInerney - Model Behaviour, p.106

We can learn a few lessons from marrying this sort of advert to a passage as succinct and brilliant as this. The model, above, remains nameless. We can identify her only through her perfect physical features, the company that she is representing with those physical features, and the non-physical branding that goes into constructing the 'idea of H&M'. This idea defines its customers and how they think of themselves. However, it also indicates something about larger patterns of behaviour- male sexuality, female 'self-identification', perhaps even actual aesthetics. This is obvious, but the pernicious non-physical elements of an advert like this are less obvious.

This woman is 'desirable'. She is leaning back. A male audience is expected, rather than encouraged, to find her desirable. She thus becomes a 'sexual possession', but the promise of sexual union between the male gaze and the female figure is indefinitely postponed. From a 'female perspective', one can imagine being 'confronted by' one's own self-consciousness. This intimidates 'vulnerable people' into wanting to emulate the model's physical form and behaviour, and to project her 'imagined likes' and 'pet peeves', rather than being encouraged to 'better themselves' through exercise or to go on holiday. The viewer constructs the models identity.

To 'reiterate', the model is nameless. This isn't because, like at bus-stops, at taxi-ranks, and at bars, self-consciousness has 'infected how we do things' and has made us unable to ask her name. Instead, an outside source- the 'nebulous advertiser'- has deliberately not supplied her with a name. We are thus attracted to an idea that is not 'physically displayed'. Perhaps this is 'pure image', where we project our own set of desires and drives. She isn't given a personality that isn't defined by her 'cultivated desirability'. Indeed, can you remember what colour her eyes are? How does she like her tea?

She is, then, an idea. What we worship here is an 'illusion', an aesthetic ideal delivered with 'corporate baggage'.

The moral of the story: where does 'caramel skin' end and where do tan-lines start?

Mount Kimbie - 'Crooks & Lovers'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 10:33:00 +0000

Sorry guys, but the game is up. Dubstep is dead. It was quite fun while it lasted, getting caned on horse tranquilisers and allowing deep bass to mess with our conception of time. For a while, this kept the crowd hyped and, at home, those basslines exerted enough Hertz to cause the deaths of pets exposed to them. However, at some point around 2008, in between some excellent Soul Jazz compilations, and the aftermath of Benga and Coki’s ‘Night’, a ‘Doom’s Night’ for youths in hoods, the movement melted Ministry of Sound started putting out dubstep compilations and, as when jungle became drum & bass, and that became “d&b”, dubstep has become saturated, sanitised and scare free. Instead of being the sound of the streets, it became the sound of suburban discotheques.

Fortunately for the avid listener, as opposed to the consumer, and for those who like to use prefixes like pre-, post-, and proto- to vindicate their taste, we have a new bunch of gurus. Artists on Hessle Audio, Hemlock, and Hotflush records, to which Mount Kimbie belong, are breaking moulds and producing some mutated, gob-stopping, tech-flecked dub. While their contemporaries flirt with free jazz and uneven synth clobber, or rigorous and thumping techno, Mount Kimbie’s approach is more delicate, ambient.

You can read the rest of this review on 'Sup Mag's website here.

Cobra Woman

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:43:00 +0000

This is a cross post of something I wrote for PopMatters.

Cobra Woman operates like a time machine, but it’s completely free of the complicated metaphysical consequences of stepping into one. Offering an insight into the creative processes, techniques, marketing skills, and audience demographics of a time long gone, it is an extraordinary film. Cobra Woman falls into the ‘Eastern’ genre popular in the 1940s. Today, such a concept would demand sensitive, intelligent direction and self-serious script writing. It would demand dusty, clattering, epic character-studies about political disenfranchisement and those characters’ conflicting drives and desires. It would imply a relationship to the Western, in the mold of Giant or Hud, akin to the relationship between the Gothic genre and its southern counterpart.

For Universal in 1944, these films were pure escapism, dragging the collective consciousness of audiences away from the horrors in Europe. For an audience in the 21st century, the ‘Eastern’ is a gloriously unspecific genre, pure exotica gold. A contemporary audience cannot ever be sure where Cobra Woman is set. It could be set in a generic Middle Eastern state, or it could be set in a generic state in the Indian subcontinent. There are hints of both, but they overlap into something unclear. Perhaps we, the 21st century audience, think of ourselves as being more enlightened. We are thus sure that actor Sabu, the son of an elephant driver, ultimately here playing the role of an apprentice Westerner, is not from a Middle Eastern background. Indeed, certain elements of Cobra Woman would have Edward Said turning in his grave like a grimly revolving kebab, a deep-fried stereotype.

It’s a spectacle built of sheer camp. Full of golden thrones shaped like cobras, sparkling dresses designed by Vera Drake, and hyper-religiosity directed towards actual cobras, the film is soundtracked by yowling and occupied by the flailing of its extras. Ordinarily, where films use dialogue and action to further drama or to propel a plot, Cobra Woman is fantastical to the point where these become irrelevant. It uses three central adventure-film archetypes to attempt to achieve thus. First, it relies on the ill-defined need of its hero, Ramu, to travel to a mysterious island. The island in question is called Cobra Island, which is enticing in its obviousness. Second, the film relies on Ramu encountering forbidding, and forbidden, royalty. Here, this takes the form of a Maria Montez double-act, where she simultaneously plays Ramu’s fiancée Tollea and her evil twin sister Naja. The tension between the two Montezs is the central driving force of the film, but it makes unbearably little sense.

A review written by the brilliant Bosley Crowther in the New York Times in 1944 summarizes the plot perfectly. He writes that, while the only discernible plot seems to be extracted from comic strips, the sole piece of clear narrative an audience can gather is that ‘Cobra Island is ruled by a viperous doll who snake-dances in the sacred temple, surrounded by a bevy of night-gowned toots’. It really has to be seen to be believed. Where the acting is blisteringly awful, and Maria Montez remains deadpan throughout, the film is captured in rich, charming, Technicolor. Cobra Woman is tremendous fun. It’s full of very-1940s signifiers, most importantly that we see the film’s romantic leads tangled in a kiss at the center of the screen and the absurd and violent deaths of its villains. By the onset of the action on Cobra Island, Cobra Woman has already sacrificed its opening fifteen minutes to oblivion and irrelevance. Perhaps this is how the film is best experienced: with bleary eyes as the perfect remedy to a blurry hard day’s night, the trembling attempt to smooth out a comfortable Sunday afternoon.

You can read this piece at Short Ends and Leader, the film blog belonging to online cultural studies journal PopMatters here.

Post it to your Facebook, to Twitter, or to any other social media site to which you might be a member.

Roman Polanski Free

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:18:00 +0000

Those guys at The Young Turks know what they're talking about. You can access their YouTube channel here.

What does 'the Polanski situation' really mean? One needs to evaluate the accusations, taking into consideration all the features of the case including 'the nature of modelling shoots' or, at a wider level, 'the nature of the film industry'.

Also, his exile, and how he is simultaneously a 'transnational pariah' and an artistic fugitive, needs to be taken into account.

Finally, one needs to question whether there any consequences, due to the potential for a relationship between ethics and aesthetics, for his legacy?

Fibes, Oh Fibes! - 'Love Will Always Find A Way' (Damien Adore remix)

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:24:00 +0000

This is Fibes, Oh Fibes!'s Love Will Always Find A Way (Damien Adore Remake). It was Song of the Day on Popjustice on Wednesday and, as Popjustice pointed out, this remix sounds a lot like New Order.

Fibes, Oh Fibes! are Swedish. Ordinarily, we would thus expect them to be a high-concept pop act, contemporaries of bands like jj or The Radio Dept, or labels like Luxxury, Service (and thus The Tough Alliance), or Sincerely Yours. Instead, their pop is unabashed, in the mould of Phil Collins or Lionel Richie sans irony. Indeed, they event collaborated with Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp on last year's album 1987. How one feels about this depends on how one feels about the capitalist colonisation of new wave music.

Damien Adore, however, has managed to drag Fibes, Oh Fibes! out of their pit of potential mediocrity and dishes out a fine electro remix. Here, there are bleeps that sound like the interference between mobile phones and other electronic equipment. Here, there are synths with new wave sheen. Here, there is a colossal amount of reverb, delivered with enough nuance to sound more like a bill to chillwave than a blowjob to the sountrack of The Bodyguard.

Nonetheless, Fibes, Oh Fibes! have also worked with Bloodshy and Avant, producers of some of the most credible pop hits of the last decade, which surprisingly includes Christina Milian's 'AM To PM' and 'When You Look At Me'. The latter also make up two-thirds of Miike Snow.

None of this, however, stops Fibes, Oh! Fibes from having a ridiculous name.

Katy Perry - 'California Gurls'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:48:00 +0000

This is the video for 'California Gurls' by Katy Perry.

'California Gurls' is a song so inescapably, so devillishly, perfect that it defies rational explanation. Not only is every second of its four minutes riddled with delirious nu-disco hooks, it sports a magnificent video created by Matthew Cullen of Motion Theory.

The song marries a clear new wave ethos with a solid gold pop chorus. Even the vocal nuances that finish the verses' sentences are glorious. Finally, to top it all off, it has a guest performance from Snoop Dogg.

While the song was released as single in May, and the video was put out in mid-June, it seems appropriate to write about it since it has recently come to 'Technolusty attention' that Katy Perry will be supplying the voice of Smurfette in next years Smurfs movie.

Scissor Sisters and Kylie Minogue - 'Any Which Way' @ Glastonbury

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:05:00 +0000

This is the Scissor Sisters performing 'Any Which Way' with Australian 'pop-pixie' Kylie Minogue at Glastonbury on Saturday.

Without a doubt, this is the most 'vigorously camp' and 'vibrantly fucking funky' thing any of us have ever seen or will ever see.

Disco didn't really suck.

Metric Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:36:00 +0000

Metric are one of those bands. They play like bands you already know and love, but they’re rapidly occupying a position as one of those bands themselves. They sew twitchy new wave to witchy melodies, sounding like the topography of the early 21st century, where genres are cross-pollinated and expectations are upset. Metric’s guitar pop is interjected by bubbling keyboards, upsetting the odd post-grunge purism that dominated the airwaves when they were first formed back in 1998.

Above is the opening paragraph of an interview I did with Metric a week or so ago for Sup. It went really well, and rapidly dissolved into an affable chat about consumer capitalism, the media, and 'the hipster apocalypse'. You can read it here. However, it's an edited version. This means that it's considerably shorter than the actual transcript and the dialogue is simplified somewhat. I don't really have a problem with this, but it means that the best bits have been cut. Alas!

Below is a video of Metric playing 'Gimme Sympathy' on Jools Holland (25/5/2010). Conveniently, the interview took place this week.

Read it or something.

Israel Flotilla Raid

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:12:00 +0000

This is Cenk Ugyur from The Young Turks commenting on Israel's most recent series of controversies. Ugyur usually talks a lot of sense, so no further commentary is really required.

However, I would propose that Binyamin Netanyahu announce very soon that he intends to 'dissolve' the state of Israel, leaving Hamas to 'its own devices'. I would also like him to encourage the 'mass suicide' of the world's thirteen million Jews (0.2% of the world's population). Then who would everyone blame for 'their woes'?

Derrick Bird

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:43:00 +0000

The news channels are 'just like The Day Today', but they replaces the erudite comedy writing with 'grim reality' both at home and overseas.

I Am

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:00:00 +0000

This is I Am. It was written, directed, and produced by Steven Nicholas Smith.

In Smith's own words, I Am

'is not only a film but a social experiment that took strangers in Philadelphia and asked them to finish this sentence. "I am ___." Through these responses, the film-maker was able to create a montage of answers and then delve deeper into a select few and allow them to explore their answers even further, creating not only written poems but a visual metaphor of these responses.'

Sex and the City 2

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Sat, 29 May 2010 12:07:00 +0000

This is the trailer for the 'consumerism-lionising' film Sex and the City 2. I'm impressed that it manages to both be 'morally reprehensible' and factually wrong. It depicts a world where consumption is more important than creating or producing anything. In addition, it depicts a world where 'being a rich WASP' gives you a sense of 'globalised entitlement'. Here, in spite of certain Middle Eastern states often 'getting a bit uppity' about things like drinking and 'not wearing very many clothes', 'the girls' manage to swan around Abu Dhabi as if it were 'like New York, but sandier'.

Luckily, the critics hated the film.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote:

'I once watched Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, the legendary, gloomy black-and-white Hungarian film that lasts for seven-and-a-half hours. Compared with the Abu Dhabi section of Sex and the City 2, Sátántangó zips past like an episode of Spongebob Squarepants.'

The inimitable Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times wrote:

'Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies.'

The most damning indictment of the film, however, came from Laurie Penny in the New Statesman, who wrote:

Any woman who claims not to enjoy Sex and the City is still considered to be either abnormal or fibbing, at least by a certain strain of highly-paid fashion columnist whose lives probably bear an unusual resemblance to that of the show’s protagonist, lifestyle writer Carrie Bradshaw. For the young women of my generation, however, Sex and the City’s vision of individual female empowerment rings increasingly hollow, predicated as it is upon conspicuous consumption, the possession of a rail-thin Caucasian body type, and the type of oblivious largesse that employs faceless immigrant women as servants.

There's not much that can be added. You can, however, read a collection of reviews of the film (two of which are quoted above) in The Guardian here.

Ultimately, it seems that, for some, 'fabulous shoes' are a material expression of salvation.

NME Radar Tour 2010: Darwin Deez/Everything Everything/Hurts

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:12:00 +0000

Radar was first invented by a series of scientists and engineers in the early part of the 20th century. During the Second World War, the British pioneered its use in defending themselves from Nazi attack. It is now used in aviation, seafaring, and meteorology to guide planes, boats, and all sorts of weather-related activity, away from harm. The NME Radar Tour, meanwhile, is quickly becoming a musical institution. In the past year, it has helped to elevate La Roux, Maximo Park, Friendly Fires, and Crystal Castles to wider celebrity.

This implies that the tour acts simultaneously as radar, a launch pad, and a teleporter, picking up bands on the horizon, or on the cusp of acclaim, and letting them burst into the screen of the public sphere. It also means that both the tour and the bands it detects can be described using protracted and confusing metaphors. Here, terms borrowed from military hardware, science, and Star Trek, can be used to draw comparisons between electromagnetic pulses and their corresponding musical sensations. The Radar Tour is a great tool for delving into hard sci-fi imagery. Some cool bands play on it, too.

You can read the rest of this 'literary trinket' here.

Meanwhile, this is the video for 'Wonderful Life' by Hurts.

They are very good. So good, in fact, that they deserve to be inescapably huge.

Miranda Sawyer on Nando's

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Sat, 22 May 2010 12:16:00 +0000

picture nabbed from The Observer. Sue me, 'plz'.

Last Sunday, Miranda Sawyer in The Observer wrote a particularly absurd article about chicken chain restaurant Nando's.

Essentially, the article glorified multiculturalism to the point of turning 'multicultural people' into commodities to be impartially observed from behind your 'Macbook'. This attitude isn't very different to that of 19th century 'armchair anthropologists', or phrenologists, commenting on the 'savagery' of the African peoples. Miranda Sawyer has made Nando's sound like a hub of 'youthful international relations', rather than it simply being another chain restaurant. She has made its atmosphere and food sound 'classy'. In fact, Sawyer seems to have turned into the worst sort of 'self-congratulatorily liberal', priding herself for being 'down with the kids'. The article stops just short of creeping up to Britain's 'urban/black/mixed-race' youth and 'patting on the head' for 'not being white'. It pretends that Nando's is something like Diner. Most heinously, it saw nothing wrong with going on and on about 'black people eating chicken', as if this wasn't a prime example of self-conscious bourgeois inverted racism. Perhaps the 'media classes' need to see more of 21st century Britain than from the inside of a car.

Its worst offence was this gem of a line, where Sawyer described grime-pop artists Tinchy Strider and Chipmunk as if they were 'stand-ins' for Britain's young 'non-white' population, claiming that

they are typical Nando's customers, with parents or grandparents born outside the UK who have brought up their offspring to have a spicier palate. Social and confident, happy to hang out with mates, these kids are easy with eating out and expect to be treated well when they do.

It seems that Sawyer is drawing a connection between 'not-being-British' in the 'traditional sense' with having a good social life and good manners. Contrary to Sawyer's beliefs, it is probably the case that all people of all races and culture have this ethos. Sawyer seems to suggest that one 'participates in' multiculturalism rather than it just being an everyday occurance. Clearly she hates white people, but she seems to not have much time for the other races, ethnicities, and culture she so lionises in this article. Ultimately, she hates herself for being herself.

Technolust very prepared to admit that he 'hates white people' as much as Miranda Sawyer. Technolust is 'not white', but he is also 'not-not white'. Technolust is caught in between other peoples' obsession with 'multiculturalism' as an ideology and doing what comes 'Technolustily' naturally- unselfconciously blending between the different cultures that he is descended from. Technolust does, however, reserve a special disdain for self-hating Observer readers. These people have no time for collective behaviour, and they have no time for the individual either. They are threatened by the white working classes becase they remind them of their past. They latch onto other cultures and squeeze them until culture itself is just another item listed on a menu in an overpriced Islington eaterie. Contrary to the article, it 'is possible' that WASPs have friends too. Sawyer has made herself, and the self-satisfied 'multiculturalists' she speaks for look and sound like one of the creases in David Cameron's forehead.

'Dear John' and 'The Last Song'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:53:00 +0000

This is the trailer for Dear John. It 'stars' Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfriend. It is based on the book by Nicholas Sparks, 'author of The Notebook'. It is clearly a gently exploitative semi-study of the 'trials of wartime', where 'love' is the component that glues people together across geographic divides. It picks up on a very real phenomenon- that soldiers are real people with real lives that shouldn't be spat at by people who disagree with whatever war they're fighting with 'half-baked' political reasoning.

This is the trailer for The Last Song. It 'stars' Miley Cyrus and Greg Kinnear. It is based on the book by Nicholas Sparks, 'author of The Notebook'. It is clearly a gently exploitative semi-study of the 'trials of parenting', where 'love' is the component that glues people together across geographic divides. It picks up on a very real phenomenon- that younger brothers are always superficially unaware of what's going on, that moody teenagers are always meant to be 'nervous about their potential' which is eventually found 'neat' by 'young hotties' and that dads who get divorces always 'get spiritual' and go and 'find themselves'.

There is very little difference between these films. This is not simply because of their author, or their authorial intentions. They are both 'films for girls' about love, redemption, and characters that teeter on the 'edge of heartbreak'. They are both directed in violent earnest- by Lasse Hallström and Julie Ann Robinson respectively. Where the former looks like Atonement being shovelled into a deranged present by Jarhead, the latter is like So Little Time being stripped of its goofball comedy by all those early-noughties films about brawny jocks 'finding their vulnerable side'. Here, I refer to A Walk to Remember. Unsurprisingly, this film, starring 'then-famous' Mandy Moore, was also 'based on the book written by Nicholas Sparks'.

Everyone in the films is 'conventionally attractive', with Channing Tatum being the unthinking lady's 'buffting', and Hallock Beals being a younger, chiselled, yet ultimately empty 'buffting'. Both films promote anti-male 'body fascism', they implant a sense of 'poetic meaning' into being a creative or a romantic person, and they suggest that the sort of 'intense emotions' and 'formative experiences' felt by the characters are immediately accessible to the viewer. This is not the case. Most of the male viewers aren't going to be beach volleyball playing jocks, or soldiers; most of the viewers, whether male or female, aren't going to have any 'analogue relationships' that supposedly make contact more meaningful when e-mail is so readily available; peoples' lives are boring, and no amount of jump-cutting or power balladry is going to change that.

Go to hell, Hollywood.

Bret Easton-Ellis - 'Imperial Bedrooms'

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:06:00 +0000

This is the front cover for Bret Easton Ellis's new book, Imperial Bedrooms.

It is the sequel to 1985's Less Than Zero.

This overview has been circulating the internet recently. I assume it is leaked from Ellis's publicist or similar.

Clay seems to have moved on – he’s become a successful screenwriter – but when he returns from New York to Los Angeles, to help cast his new movie, he’s soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his vulnerable former girlfriend, is now married to Trent – still a bisexual philanderer – and their Beverly Hills parties attract excessive levels of fame and fortune. Clay’s childhood friend Julian is a recovering addict running an ultra-discreet, high-class escort service, and their old dealer Rip, reconstructed and face-lifted nearly beyond recognition, is involved in activities far more sinister than those of his notorious past.

After a meeting with a gorgeous but talentless actress determined to win a role in his movie, Clay finds himself connected with Kelly Montrose, a producer whose gruesomely violent death is suddenly very much the talk of the town. As his seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal leads him to be drawn further and further into this ominous case it looks like he will face far more serious consequences than ever before.

It is set to be released on July 2nd.

You can pre-order it on Amazon here.

Vice & Intel: Creators of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Technolustmaxx) — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:41:00 +0000

This is the logo for the new collaboration between (the beautiful people at) Vice and (the computer cats at) Intel. It is called The Creators Project. As detailed by your perceptual functions, which have clearly apprehend the logo as an object presenting itself in-itself in the phenomenal world, it is 'blue and black' and in a 'nice font'.

The Creators Project features cool people creating cool things on a weekly basis. Creative contributors include UVA, Radical Friend, Spike Jonze, and Mark Ronson. They have also already made documentaries featuring Diplo, Phoenix, and Major Lazer.

Ultimately, the project is about allowing the audience to involve themselves as active co-creators of the content, as they outline in a blog post about launching the project:

The spirit that cuts across the entirety of this project is one of conversation and collaboration, which fundamentally includes you, the audience. Watch, read, comment, share, and let us know what you think of our new arts channel and content studio every step of the way.

Fortunately, though, it's not all about poststructuralist concepts. They also plan on putting on some 'sweet-ass parta(y)s' in:

New York (the launch, June 26)
London (July 17)
Sao Paolo (Aug. 14)
Seoul (Aug. 28)
Beijing (the finale, Sept. 17 to 19).

They're gonna be huge.

Wired Magazine have already written a substantial feature on the matter, and I don't particularly want to undercut it (partially because they're really good, partially out of laziness). You can read it here.

In the meantime, there's plenty of ways to 'get yourself psyched' for the arrival of the project

You can become a 'fan' of them on Facebook.
You can 'follow' them on Twitter.
You can 'clock' their Myspace page.

Cool.