Frenz | Shannon O'Neill

Utility Fog this Sunday

Adrian and I will be guest hosting Utility Fog this Sunday night from 10pm til 1am on FBi Radio 94.5FM.

Electrofringe/TINA was great this year. My highlights included the new!shop performance/installation, the Corporate Techno and sedition panels, and performances by Lloyd Barrett, DJ Scotch Egg and Robin Fox, but there was lots of other excellent stuff. My panels and gigs also went pretty well, and the nights were full of drinking and fun – all in all a wonderful festival experience. I’ve put some photos up on Flickr.

Now I have to keep my head down to prepare for my end of year PhD presentation next week, as well as finishing off some other work that’s overdue. See you on the other side!

TINA time

This Is Not Art is on in Newcastle this weekend. It’s my favourite Australian festival – if you’ve never been, you should check it out. I’ll be doing a couple of talks and a couple of performances.

uncomfortably numb

I know that I’ve written bugger all of substance here in ages (and that’s all I’ll say about that, as there are few things duller than a blogger blogging about not blogging) but I had hoped to regale you with some travel anecdotes.

Unfortunately a strange thing happened to me earlier this week – I lost feeling in half of my left hand, or rather it ‘went to sleep’ with a combination of numbness and ‘pins & needles’. I panicked at first, thinking it might be a stroke – after nearly 30 hours of cramped flight home, DVT was a possibility, so I went to the GP and he did the relevant tests and advised me that it wasn’t a stroke and that I should just rest the arm and it’d hopefully be better in a few days.

Well it’s a few days later and it isn’t much better. Some activities such as writing (I’m left-handed) typing and upper body exercise are difficult and make it worse. I’ve been terrified that it might be the beginning of Multiple Sclerosis (I’ve had both an aunt and an uncle die from MS, and the doctors suspect that my mother now has it – so I’m about as high risk as possible) but searching on the web leads me to believe that it’s most likely a case of Cubital Tunnel Syndrome aka Ulnar Nerve Entrapment or Ulnar Tunnel Syndrome (UTS!).

Hopefully it’s due to some temporary inflammation, but if the problem hasn’t gone away in a few more days, I’ll need to see a specialist. For now I should try to stay away from computers and any other aggravation. So there won’t be much blogging for a while (well it’s not a bad excuse…).

I’ve uploaded lots of travel pics to my Flickr page, and there are still plenty more to come, which I’ll try to finish soon.

Greetings, Hunter!

Greetings Cosmonauts,

The astral conjunction between Mister Snow and Zina Kaye has produced the stellar event 20:22 28/06/2006 Hunter Kaye.
More information is available at your local cosmos, or the intersmelly : http://zina.org.

Peace 2

Z = H = S

dual plover news

kevin blechdom is returning to australia in august/september! highly recommended. unfortunately i’ll be o/s when she plays in sydney – maybe i’ll make it to the blue mountains show, or maybe there’ll be another sydney gig around then.

also, lieutenant colonel spastic howitzer is playing at hermann’s this friday! more info below:

5 years on since our last installment of the rebirth of fool compilation series we have made yet another abomination to wealth creation in volume 3. the worst one yet and also the most expensive, labour intensive item we’ve produced. for reasons i cant remember this cd comes packaged in a hand bound, gold blocked, 24 page book (thanks keggles) and is selling for the same amount as the rest of our cheaply produced and put together items!

so if you wanna dumb your ears down between bouts of xenakis and cage and hear the latest in retardation like 7u? channeling wesley willis in an ode to this very organization, testimonials from my miserablelife.com put to music by fool veterans new waver, unrequited love songs set in seedy adelaide establishments, instructional songwriting cassettes, gay audio porn spoken in thick australian accents, absurd police tapes and a whole lotta other stuff not worth listing then this is the album for you.

we’re launching the album in 4 sleeps time at our HAPPY NEW FINANCIAL YEAR PARTY being held this friday the 30th june at HERMANNS, cnr city and butlin streets, sydney university. artists from the album rank sinatra, lt colonel spastic howitzer and naked on the vague (hoppy has bad tables track on fool 3) will be performing as well as a host of others including curse ov dialect, toecutter, the warm feelings, rev kriss hades, bradbury and justice yeldham, plus taxation themed karaoke. all this and more for a poultry 8 bucks or 5 if your a bludger.

it’s also a celebration of 10 years as a label, yes this year marks 10 years since lucas first forked out the cash for his belated release ‘a kombi – music to drive by’ which subsequently brought dualpLOVER into the world. a partnership was formed soon after when friend and swerve joined the fold shortly before releasing ‘alternahunk’ the labels second offering which also made the house of plover not just a vanity label for lucas but a fully fledged concern.

since then, somehow, to our bewilderment we have been wrongly labeled as a novelty music label, by people unable to get a total grasp of the musical importance of releases like ‘singing sadie’ or ‘deano merino’. so far this year our release schedule reflects our desire to shake this wrongly formed image with some hard hitting new titles filled with focused aggression fraught with ideology that will cause irreparable changes to a society that allows this type of unchecked DIY publishing to exist in the first place. just take a look at our first 3 explosive releases this year alone. toxic lipsticks’ ‘prisoner of hormones’ ep is an enraged expose on the current youth identity crisis that finds woman of apparent maturity singing at an emotional level of a 14 year old’s. new wavers – ‘neuters’ retrospective (released in collaboration with melbourne’s spill label) delves deep into the corporate world in the 90′s that led to current fascination with australian bands that sound like old bands form the past that where highly successful. and bradbury’s latest masterpiece ‘instant obvilian’ which unmasked the true horror of what homosexual electronic music can really be.

and it keeps on coming in the next few months expect new plover goodies from ‘naked on the vague’ whose debut 7 inch single is currently being pressed in nashville Tennessee and a new full length album ‘the timid mischief’ by old timing banjo legend ‘al duvall’.

also very fucking exciting news is the upcoming kevin blechdom tour we’re booking this august / september all over the country. she’s fucking tops and you’ld be considered a dickhead to miss this, more info soon.

http://www.dualplover.com/blechdom.html

other future news, dualplover plans to diversify into the film world and hold a drive-in short film festival. we are currently looking for a nice car park to hold this event in and have started the call out for films to show no deadline yet but if you have any short films, animations, music videos or found footage that’s not quite right please send it to us for consideration to dualplover drive-in film festival pobox 983 darlinghurst nsw 1300.

thankyou for your time

dualplover.com

Itinerary

OK, I’ve booked my flights. Here’s the itinerary:

Wednesday August 2 – San Francisco
Monday August 7 – San Jose (ISEA)
Monday August 14 – New York
Friday August 18 – London
Friday August 25 – Amsterdam
Monday August 28 – Berlin
Saturday September 2 – Sydney

That’s a bit less time in SF than I wanted, so depending on how things go I might delay going to SJ by a day or two..

If you have any suggestions for things to do, places to see, people to meet in any of those places, please let me know! My main intention is to check out the music and art scenes to see how they compare with Australia. I have a few contacts already, but more would be good.

Also some opportunities to present my work (eg gigs/talks/radio) would be nice, but that’s not my highest priority.

Apparently this is the peak travel season, so even with student discounts the flights alone cost four grand(!) which means I can’t actually afford to book accom right now. I’m saving madly and should be able to afford it soon, but any suggestions of good value (non-hostel) accom or friendly ppl to stay with would be greatly appreciated.

Diaspora

I finished reading Greg Egan’s Diaspora the other day. What a great novel – it really scratched my posthuman itch. Sure it’s not perfect: some of the plot and character development was weak, but the world he creates is plausible, detailed and compelling. Bring on the Introdus!

I’d love to see someone try to make a film of it. It’d be the ultimate FX challenge, with its scapes and multidimensional macrospheres.

It’s embarrasing that it took me so long to get around to reading it – a friend bought me the paperback a few years ago. It was published in 1997 and has been very influential, especially among Antipodeans involved in electronic music, eg:

Julian Oliver aka de|ire, released an album called Diaspora in 2003.
Graham Freeman’s blog Virulent Memes was, I think, named after a phrase from the book.
Brisbane sound artists Lloyd Barrett and Joe Musgrove have a project called Diaspora.

And I know that Peter is also a fan of Egan’s work.

I was a big cyberpunk fan in the 80s but haven’t read much SF since then. Now I want more! Any recommendations?

Broken Postal Cab

After hearing about them everywhere in recent months I finally checked out the music of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, two projects of American indie singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard.

Both bands have similar songs, with a tendency for bittersweet lyrics and melodies, but whereas Death Cab is an indie rock band that has been active since the mid 90s, Postal is a more recent collaboration with electronic music producer Jimmy Tamborello aka Dntel.

I listened to nearly all of their recordings. They’re very enjoyable and catchy (especially the recent albums) albeit somewhat innocuous. And I watched their videos, including the Death Cab tour film Drive Well, Sleep Carefully which like most rockumentaries isn’t very good, but worth a look if you like the music.

Then a funny thing happened. For the next few days my mind started creating Gibbard-style tunes. There were several of them, a few of which I imagined being good enough to record. I soon forgot most of them but managed to record one using software. The results were disappointing, which reminded me that pop music is as much about the sound as the song, and I’m not setup for making pop sounds at the moment (although I’m well sorted for experimental music!).

One of the keys to Gibbard’s music is his voice, which really is the perfect American indiepop nerdboy voice, with a pure, vibratoless tone. (Although his singing is much less convincing live (on the videos I’ve seen) which is OK when he’s among fans, but really not very good on TV show appearances.)

Death Cab for Cutie – Ben Gibbard, second from left

I still don’t have the confidence to record my singing with any conviction (I’ll occasionally sing a part as a way of sketching it before replacing it with another sound). I really believe I could, but need to get over the fear – of my music snob friends laughing at me as much as of just not being very good. Maybe some lessons would help me get over that hurdle. Likewise with guitar.

Not that I want to emulate Gibbard’s music – that was just an exercise, as I wanted to do something with those tunes that were popping into my head. If I actually developed any of them I’m sure they’d mutate into something quite different. But the experience did reinforce my ongoing urge to do some sort of vocal/song project. I’m just not sure of the best way to approach it. I guess the easiest way would be to start as a solo electronic project, that way I wouldn’t have to show it to anyone until I was happy with it. But it would be nice to have collaborators…

The thing is that although I love a lot of indie music I’m not into the indie scene at all. The Broken Social Scene gig that I went to recently was great musically, but I found the majority of the audience incredibly annoying. I’m much more at home in my experimental music ghetto.

But I’ve been listening to so much indie lately (I blame Last.fm) that it’s beginning to affect me. The other day I found myself wearing a short sleeve t shirt over a long sleeve t shirt! And I even dug out my old Chuck Taylors which I hadn’t worn since the 80s, but the rubber had turned to chalk. I went online and discovered to my delight that Converse now make them in black monochrome! I almost bought them until I discovered that they charge about 50 bucks for postage, and they won’t deliver to P.O. boxes (what’s up with that?).

What’s happening to me?? I hope I’m not becoming a grup! Nah, it’s probably just a phase I’m going through…

Shannon O'Neill

Utility Fog this Sunday

Barking Knuckles

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