FADviral

I love Poly Styrene.  She was one of a kind.  As lead singer of X-Ray Spex, she performed nightly at London’s legendary Roxy club during the peak of the 1970s punk era – even though their sax-laden sound and her caterwauling cries didn’t exactly fit the punk rock mould.  (They actually lent it so much more.)  Her lyrics, dealing mainly with consumerism and identity issues, were decades ahead of their time, but between the friction she triggered within the band and her eventual carting off to a mental institution after an encounter with a day-glo UFO, X-Ray Spex seemed to quickly fall off the musical radar.

In fact, X-Ray Spex were active for such a short time that their musical legacy consists of little more than one album and a handful of singles, but it has always seemed like a much greater body of work than that produced by many of their multi-album contemporaries.

BBC Three’s “I Believe In…” series may focus on random celebrities researching their unconventional beliefs, but I’m not sure the producers intended for viewers to be facepalming throughout each episode.  Then again, maybe they did.  One show about belief in ghosts seemed more like a showcase for Joe Swash’s intellect (or lack thereof) after all.  (See Throng’s devastating lowdown on that one.)

This week, cockney actor Danny Dyer went in pursuit of UFOs, but anybody familiar with the Grand Theft Auto franchise would be forgiven for thinking the spirit of Kent Paul had possessed him and was the real star of the show.  Kent Paul meets Sir Patrick Moore (facepalm).  Kent Paul travels to Stan Romanek’s American home (”how are ya bruvver, pleasure to meetcha sunshine, awroight?”; facepalm) to see footage of his peeping alien (facepalm).  Dyer’s journey through the United States almost seems like a continuation of our last encounter with Kent Paul, who we last saw stranded in the desert – next to an Area 51 clone – back in GTA: San Andreas.

Dyer is pretty unconvincing overall – giving an impression of  disbelief in every “expert” thrown at him but reluctantly giving the last one (James Gilliand) credit for the sake of a satisfying ending.  The show is not best suited to i-Player viewing on a PC either because the urge to Google every “expert” as they appear (and see their claims debunked) is just too irresistible.  Strangely though, watching the formulaic foundations of the “I Believe In…” series laid bare, not to mention the cockney comedy moments of this episode, are what make it particularly watchable.  Well… maybe if you’ve got nothing better to do.

I Believe In UFOs: Danny Dyer is available on BBC i-Player for another two days.

From the recent Earth Times article, Music therapy eases Tinnitus:

…researchers at the Westfalia Wilhelms University in Muenster, Germany… found that it is possible to alleviate that ringing by carefully “administering” sound of frequencies other than those which cause the ringing. In essence, the scientists were able to condition the patients’ minds to “ignore” the tinnitus frequencies and to focus only on the pleasant musical frequencies.

Interesting.  It has long been suggested that the “badly tuned radio” noises attributed to tinnitus are down to the brain “filling in” the frequencies it can no longer receive due to hearing loss.  For that reason, I began experimenting with tone generating software last year to get some respite from my own (unilateral) tinnitus.

Roberto Forcen’s Expression Tone Generator provided the best results, possibly because one of its presets swings right through the frequency range my left ear can no longer hear.  It would initially provide only a few seconds of respite, but after a few months, a couple of minutes of listening through headphones would grant about one hour of relief from tinnitus.  That may not sound significant, but it’s enough to cross the sleep threshold at night and not wake until morning.

It has always bothered me that the Last.fm scrobbler remains in memory when Windows Media Player (WMP) is closed.  WMP loads it into memory after all.  But the obvious (and incredibly easy) solution to this annoyance didn’t occur to me until somebody posted a WinAmp specific solution in this forum thread.  Why not write a WMP plugin which unloads the scrobbler myself?  Doh!

So, here it is and feel free to grab a copy but do bear in mind that I’ve only tested it with WMP 12 (which ships with Windows 7).  I’m fairly sure it will work with WMP 11, although probably not earlier versions.

Usage is straightforward enough: Just run the installer and forget about it.  If you’re of a curious disposition however: The installer copies a file called Last Unloader.dll to a location within the Program Files folder and registers it as a WMP plugin.  Upon next launching WMP, a new entry appears on the plugins menu called “Last Unloader Plugin”.   From that point on, the Last.fm scrobbler will be told to shutdown whenever WMP is closed.  Last Unloader will then unload itself of course.

If it’s not for you, simply uninstall via Control Panel.

While turbulent Tel-Aviv electrorockers Terry Poison only released their début album last year, they have actually been around much longer — accumulating musicians and steadily releasing EPs since vocalist Louise Kahn and her friend Noga Netzer formed riot-grrrl duo Cherry Poison back in 2003.

Well, Noga has since sadly departed, but the band is stronger than ever – supporting Depeche Mode on the Israeli leg of their 2009 tour, and enjoying considerable success in national radio charts with several album tracks.

What has always struck me about Terry Poison though is the disparity between their recorded tracks and live performances.  While their recorded stuff has the studio polish you’d expect from most mainstream artists of today, they give riotous, unchoreographed, old skool performances on stage that barely resemble it.

Very refreshing in an age when pop acts are so concerned with replicating the CD experience on stage that they might as well just play the discs and mime.  Oh wait, they do!

We luvs ya Terry.  Don’t change a thing!  <3

If there is such thing as an electro-music canon, then Kitsuné Maison surely fires all the shots.  For the past seven years this Parisian record label’s strategy has been to sign every electronic act it can lay its hands on, and provided just a handful garner some degree of success – well, that pays the bills and covers the losses accrued by those that didn’t quite make it.   And such is Kitsuné’s talent for spotting exceptional acts that the mediocre ones are difficult to find.

A brilliant offshoot of the sign-em-all approach is the informative aspect of the compilation discs it brings about.  The first Kitsuné Maison Compilation emerged in 2005 and was such a success that another seven volumes have been pressed since.  Featuring everything from niché acts like Exchpoptrue to mainstream electro-pop like La Roux (via such über-cool talent as autoKratz, Boys Noize and HeartsRevolution – to name a few), these discs provide a profound introduction into contemporary electro for new ears, while offering an excellent insight into up-and-coming artists for the more seasoned listener.

HeartsRevolution are an electro-thrash act with borderline personality disorder.  One moment cheerily contemplating the future, the next tearing it apart amid fits of screaming paranoia, their overall instability makes it difficult to predict which direction their next single will take.  What’s more, the ingenious sampling and synth-work of keyboardist Ben Pollock combined with the wailing pleas of vocalist Leyla Safai invoke an atmosphere so hopeless and anarchic, so reminiscent of past-punk entangled with innovative electro, that it seems to fit the cyberpunk genre perfectly.

While (the annoyingly unavailable) Wolves + Libertines probably offers the best example of punk’s flanging and delayed rhythm guitar style being deconstructed and turned into a synthetic wall of sound, HeartsRevolution’s better known single, Ultraviolence, certainly conveys the hopeless, dystopic magic I’m talking about.

Any punks wandering the streets of LA in 2019 are more likely to be listening to this than Vangelis, that’s for sure.

Your host has been out of sorts for a couple of months for one reason or another – mainly dealing with the consequences of a relationship breakdown, the anxiety of impending ear surgery – not to mention the unilateral hearing loss that followed (never a good thing for somebody who likes to blog about music, I’m telling ya).  But now life is settling down again and I’m no longer hysterically whizzing through it like Kim Novak the streets of San Francisco in a vintage Jag, I think it’s safe to say that this blog is about to get back on the road.  Oh yeah.

So, two celebrity couples whose civil-partnerships went south end the “happy-ever-after myth” of civil-partnerships do they? If that’s the case then the outlook hasn’t looked good for traditional marriage for the past few millennia, what with stories of infidelity and rushed nuptials to avoid bastard childbirth since time immemorial.  And do remind me – as a gay man – not to have any more long-standing, platonic friends stay over (yes, in the bedroom, on the bed-settee or camp-bed), won’t you?  We wouldn’t want anybody with Jan Moir’s gutter mentality hearing about it and hallucinating gay porn.  It’s bad enough that “journalists” like her take the fictitious, tabloid speculation surrounding one gay couple and extrapolate it to homosexuals in general.

Tracey Emin is threatening to leave the country faster than you can say Paul Daniels because she doesn’t want to pay a higher tax rate, and while that’s pretty shameful (the state funded her art education and gave her annual grants that today’s students can only dream about, after all) she does have a point about France’s better understanding of art & culture.  I mean, we can’t even install a naked man on a London plinth without bystanders covering their children’s eyes, the CPS launching a criminal investigation, and tabloid outrage, but in Paris they’re dishing out filming permits for this kind of thing in the city centre on a Thursday afternoon….

Hmm, maybe I’m confusing art with nudity.  Or just looking for some tenuous excuse to post that video?  Whatever. I am so jealous of your laissez-faire attitude to life, France!

The track (Baby Baby Baby) is by Make The Girl Dance , a Parisian electro act led by Pierre Mathieu.  He is best known in France for presenting the TV programme Plus vite que la musique.  I’m not sure why the above mix became the official radio edit, because the We Are Terrorists mix is far superior.  Go and listen to it right now.  I insist!