the less permanent

You should go an vote up this T-shirt design by Sophie Kern. It’s really good and she can win money for it and then we can buy one. Here’s an interview I did with her and one I just did today with her housemate Bryony on Art and Things.

My write up of Crossing Border festival is up on The Line of Best Fit.

This is the selection of some of the words I arranged in a specific order on the subject:

“Here in the UK, the words and music trick isn’t particularly a new one. People like good books and good albums. Or they are at least prepared to feign an equal interest in 1920’s era blues and Dadaist surrealism for the sake of their own sense of cultural identity, which mindless cynicism aside, still has the pretty pleasing effect of bringing together the two art forms to enjoy a very encouraging and useful mutual appreciation. All Tomorrow’s Parties, Latitude, Green Man, Bestival – there’s probably no need to detail them all, there is no shortage of festivals that are now combining music and literature successfully to introduce another dimension to their own cultural displays. The difference with Crossing Border, however, is that rather than giving the distinct impression of a music festival momentarily tipping it’s hat to the traditions of literature (as most British festivals, for all of their intentions, invariably do) Crossing Border feels like a literature festival with a lucrative sideline in gigs. Yes, in case you’re wondering, this is actually a rather good thing. Behind Crossing Border is the definite thrum of a sincere passion for language and melody and this clearly fuels the diverse and consistent quality that the festival provides in both fields. If it wasn’t squashed hopelessly into two nights, like a symphony into a ringtone it would probably be perfect. But touring schedules are touring schedules at the end of the day, apparently.”

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The resurgence in the file sharing ‘debate’ since Lily Allen said something or other is interesting and amusing because everyone is wrong.

Although ‘heyyy you big meanies! downloading hurts small artists’ might be a point, to a cynic like me it just seems a more convenient heartstring puller than ‘file sharing hurts overpaid exploitation experts who have never played a note of music in their life and cynically exploit a creative discipline for profit and listen to U2 in their Mercedes SLK’s.’.

People who want free music without admitting to stealing v greedy major labels.

They can both fuck off.

But of course, major labels and pop stars have always given oh-so-much-of-a-fuck about the plight of struggling young bands up until now. Fuck that.

And of course if you download it and like it you’re definitely going to go to a gig and buy a t-shirt and three copies of the self-released EP the artist has had to release after the album sold 1,000 copies and they got dropped. Yeah, cause you’re a real fan with 800gb of music on your external HD that you never listen to. Well done, you prick, enjoy standing at the back and talking.

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I’m still not sure about ‘life blogging’, but people seem to be reading it and after a couple of weeks I can save up enough interesting stuff to say so I don’t feel stupid by writing nonsense about what I’ve been eating. I’ve included information on at least one thing I’ve eaten in this post.

The other day I went with friends to see Kaki King at the Jazz Cafe.

She has a new EP floating around called The Mexican Teenagers EP. If you don’t know Kaki King, you really should. I’d stream a song of hers but a) It would take forever b) It would eat up bandwidth c) I’d probably end up getting sued.

It was the best gig of the year so far for me, better than Animal Collective last week. She played with a drummer and Dan Brantigan on EVI. When they played ‘These Are The Armies of the Tyrannized’ I nearly exploded. (more…)

Right, so I made a post about this artist called Rosie Roberts who I interviewed for Art and Things maybe a week and a bit ago. Loads of my readers on here have been viewing the post and  people have been e-mailing/facebooking/talking to me about how much they like her.

So here’s some more, the art that she did for the Thee Single Spy album cover ( I took a couple of shots of it to fill space):

(In hindsight I realize I should’ve taken a picture of the back, not just two of the front. I’ll update this tomorrow)

I met their frontman Alex and interviewed him for Art and Things a couple of weeks ago. You can learn more about them and how to get hold of one of these wicked little vinyls (for free, I think) on their myspace – (if that turns out to be lie just e-mail him- what do you want from me?)

You can listen to an awesome track called Smoke That Tea by Thee Single Spy by clicking the play button below this paragraph. Make sure you listen to the whole thing because a) it comes together beautifully about halfway through and b) Alex sent it me in .wma (fair enough) but it ended up taking me ages to get this uploaded and to work properly. Like hours. So listen to it and make it worth my while. Please.

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