kind of like dying

Here I am, sat in a pub writing my own obituary.
Kind of morbid, kind of kinky.

Point is that I haven't got the internet at home and for the foreseeable future don't intend on getting it. Be it for financial reasons or just a will to live in an "ascetic" environment, this makes writing my interweb blog well hard. So I've come to the hard decision of taking a break. Like a proper break. Concentrating on like other stuff. Don't know what other stuff. Maybe music in a not third-person "ooh I like this, and I like that" kind of way.

So this is it.
Maybe I'll start up later sometime. Who knows.

Anyhows.

Thanks and toodles

T-Bone the king of AndygoesdowntoChinatown-land

More Dinosaurs (Dinosauruxia)

Ok so once upon a time there was Flow Festival right.

On the sunday, if you'd gone through all the trouble of waking up early aka. noon-ish you had the option of seeing two finnish artists that I'd been quietly anticipating.
Yona & Liikkuvat Pilvet or Dinosaruxia

Seeing as it was more of a laid back "family" day we opted for sitting outside in the sunshine and listening to Yona and her sort of Iskelmä-folk.

So yeah. We missed out on Dinosauruxia, who not only have a well cool name but also some cool tunes to go with the name.





Now the girls have got their 7" single Safe out in shops and the likes.
Sounds a wee bit Zola Jesus-ey

Oh and on Spotify too

The single has the MISF*TS remix on it too.

"Eerie"

Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are (were) amazing.

When I was a young boy I could literally name every dinosaur species that had ever existed, thanks to numerous weekly, fortnightly, monthly and annually arriving dinosaur publications.

In fact, dinosaurs were the reason I learned to read. Pictures of dinosaurs were all nice and that, but they weren't worth anything if I didn't know what was being said about the dinosaurs.



A while back. Maybe 2008. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (TEET for short) released a brilliant Go-Team-esque track called Bournemouth.



A friend of mine once laughed and exclaimed that he found it hard to believe "banging" could ever be used to describe anything about Bournemouth.

TEET released a new EP earlier this year. All In Two Sixty Dancehalls.

Here's some tunes from it.






Here's the EP on Spotify

How T-Bone moves on

Life is hard when you haven't got the internet.

Damn it. I just want to post some arbitrary posts about how my day's been or how my flowers are growing. Maybe even tell you my Wii Fit age.

Damn it, I can't do any of these things. So what I've been doing is listening to quite a bit of Four Tet and remembering how I "tore up" the dancefloor at his set last friday.

Brilliant.

Yes the weekend was good. But come on people, we gotta' move on!

The way I tend to move on is by attending auctions with my mum.
Oh yeah. We got there, ready to fend off the onslaught of granny bids and rightfully claim what was ours.

And you know what? We bid the shit out of the place.
Grannies had nothing to say after the authority of our bidding tones.
3 EURO! Wham-bam-thank-you-old-mam.

So now I've moved on. Thanks to a 3 euro battered-to-pieces violin.

I'll try to keep from talking about Flow Festival 2011 for the forseable future

laters

ps. got this today. It's a neighbour-friendly album from earlier on in the year, and a quite a good one at that.

Lillica Libertine

Yesterday I was loathing myself for not going to see LCD Soundsystem and The Chemical Brothers at Flow's pre-festival. Drowning my sorrows by searching for new records to buy.

If there's one thing I've learned from all that Sex and the City that I never watched, it's that women go shopping when they're down. So there I was feeling like a non-fashionista cyber-online music version of Carrie Bradshaw going through various record labels' webpages desperate to find something to sink my teeth into, when BEHOLD! I see that Lillica Libertine had released a 12" EP on Meal Deal Records.



I used to "dig" Lillica Libertine a lot. This was roughly 3 years ago. Then I sort of forgot about him.
Seeing that name pop up again after so many years sparked a frantic search for his Loose Lips Sink Ships track, which I remembered being fucking amazing.
Couldn't find it so I just had to listen to all his other stuff.

I should probably elaborate and tell you that Lillica Libertine is a producer from Nottingham who makes very hard-hitting electro bangers. Not completely unlike the stuff I'd hear coming out of my ex-flatmate K's room when he used to play Bloody Beetroots on repeat.

You should listen to his myspace because the only video I could find to embed was his remix of Snow Patrol's Take Back The City

ROOM SERVICE by Lillica Libertine

ULTRA 10 by Lillica Libertine



Flow Festival starts up tomorrow and that's where you'll find me. If you see me say hello. If you don't see me. Well maybe next year then.
If you have trouble recognizing me, I'm very probably the guy in the front row with a huge grin on my face.

This is T-bone out for the weekend. Have a good one and I'll catch you next week!

Forest Swords

The postal service (not the music makers) has yet again excelled and brought me my copy of Forest Swords' Dagger Paths



My missus asked me what kind of music Forest Swords is. I told her Four Tet meets dubstep. That description isn't perhaps entirely correct. What I should have said is Burial goes forwards in time and becomes obsessed with some of the ancient lo-fi recordings of this day and age.

What's present on Dagger Paths is short vocal clips á la Burial, dark, brooding basslines and distant guitar lines forming together to make a haunting post-dubstep record.



Forest Swords aka. Matthew Barnes has also included his take on Aaliyah's If Your Girl Only Knew.



Here's the original if you were wondering how the two versions were different



If you hadn't heard of Forest Swords before and this post (unlikely) got you itching for more, but you're skint and can't buy his stuff then quickly get onto spotify and check out his new single Rattling Cage

Forest Swords - Rattling Cage on Spotify

Here's Glory Gongs to round off this post of amazing experimental folk step/dubtronica/psych-whateveronica

Fail. Maybe epic. Maybe piss off.

I say I hate a lot of things, but in all honesty I don't think it's all hate. Maybe just dislike or some form of irritance.

When I for instance say that I hate Liberty Ale, I don't mean that I hate it. I just mean that I wouldn't drink more than one of them because it's got too much of a bitter aftertaste for me.

What I do however hate is people who use the meme "fail" like it's the greatest conversational input man has ever invented during it's 100 years or so of speaking in tongues.

No matter where, no matter when. Someone HAS to pipe up and say "fail" after any kind of occurance.
Maybe after sipping on a said Liberty Ale and voicing how I think it's a tad too bitter, someone might say: "Fail! It's exactly bitter enough."
Now what the hell has "fail" got to do with that?
Nothing. Yes my T2R taste receptors might express bitterness in a different manner to yours. Hardly qualifies as a win OR a fail really.

I hate it even more when something becomes an EPIC fail. To qualify as epic, the fail should be of EPIC proportions. So perhaps tripping over my shoelaces isn't quite of that said magnitude. Maybe if you were Bruce Willis about to save the world from a seemingly apocalyptical asteroid by blowing it up BUT you forgot to take your bomb with you. That could be classed as an EPIC FAIL.

But please. Please. You don't have to tell me that.

There's the rant.
Here's the music.

I like it. It's Fol Chen's In Ruins.
Nothing to do with failing.

Summer Hits (again)

The summer's been scorchio, stormy and busy. It was pointed out to me that next weekend (Flow Festival) is the first weekend off work I've had all summer. Kind of feel a lot like The Young Knives did back in 2006.



Seeing as the summer is pretty much officially over I'd rather not dwell that far back in the past, so I thought about some of the cracking tunes of this summer.

My #1 song of the summer is without a doubt Baths' frankly outstanding track Hall



I'm so looking forward to getting the Cerulean LP hopefully later this month. It's promising to be a smash hit at my alone-at-home dj set. Kind of like 2010's Passion Pit

Next up is Grum's banging remix of Everything Everything's MY KZ YR BF. The original is already wicked good, but Grum just takes it to another level. A must-like for those who love french-sounding electro. (You know who you are)



Whahey! What about Miami Horror's latest offering? Holy guacamole if I Look To You (Feat. Kimbra) isn't just a ridiculously good party tune.



The list could go on. But it doesn't.

It might. Later.

Growing up amongst samples

When I was a young boy, I was completely and utterly (and happily) oblivious to the "art-form" of sampling.
Taking something that's not yours and making it yours is traditionally classed as theft. Music-wise, all the people I ever seem to talk to about the subject seem to frown upon sampling. They say that it's not really making music and that anyone can just recycle old samples and use them to make something.



Hah. I scoff at those people. I've tried using samples to make "tunes" and they end up sounding like me trying to stuff a kit-kat in me from the wrong direction aka. not good.

I love samples. I do, I think they're great. I couldn't however tell you the timeline and history of sample-based music. Maybe there's something to do with The Sugarhill Gang in there somewhere? Anyway Hip Hop has always been my favourite source for recycled breaks and such. Much more so than electronica.



One of my favourite albums ever is Common's Be. It came out in 2005 and I was only a young lad back then. Fair enough I knew it to be chocka with samples but as I didn't have a clue as to what bits were samples and from what. I just appreciated the album as it was. Now as I've gotten older (and obviously much wiser) I've realised what some of the sampled tunes are and this has just added something more to the whole listening experience. First of all I've broadened my musical horizons by hearing some amazing, mostly, soul, funk and R'n'B tracks that I'd never heard of before. And secondly I feel like I'm in some kind of secret club where the members know this kind of wicked cool secret that's not told to "normal" people.

Ok so here are some of these amazing tunes that I've discovered via samples.

Used in Jurassic 5's Concrete Schoolyard. I always thought Concrete Schoolyard had the most awesome intro I've ever heard. This entire song is that most awesome intro


Kanye West's On My Way Home featured Common so obviously I just had to love the song. But I think most of love was because of Gil Scott-Heron's breathtaking Home Is Where The Hatred Is



Speaking of Common. Be features the track Testify which basically just samples and loops the first 10 or so seconds of Honey Cone's Innocent Til Proven Guilty.
Brilliant.



Being the disco king that I am, Chic were already contenders for ultimate party anthems way before I'd even heard Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight.



Sampling seems to be a never ending cycle. While writing this I just noticed the "slight" similarity in Rapper's Delight's "Hotel Motel" refrain as I'd heard in (don't ask me why I'm so familiar with it)Pitbull's Hotel Room Service. Funny that.


2:22 is the part I mean.

Top Girls

I came across Top Girls by chance. And what a piece of chance that was.

Not the easiest name to google. I got all sorts of top 10 lists of nude female celebrities before I found my way back to the Myspace page I was searching for.
Needless to say I was diverted by all the lists of nude females. Easy mistake.

All of a sudden I'm listening to cheesy 80's porn music instead of gorgeous harmonised vocals layered over distorted drum loops.

Well at least there was boobs.

Boobs are great.



But yes as I kind of mentioned a bit further up. Top Girls has a tendency towards mixing proper nasty distorted beats, wonderful vocal harmony and synth "arps" you'd expect to find on dancefloor bangers (although slightly toned down). Dancefloor bangers these tunes however aren't. Pondering, eerie and slightly unnerving is how I'd describe Top Girls music.

Great stuff. Especially after yesterday's storm.

Anyway. Do what you do. At least listen to Faded Feeling
Faded Feeling by Top Girls

Black Coffee and Cherry Pie

So round here in Finland a storm's a brewing. I can feel it in my bones. And I saw it on the news.

So I've braced myself for it by listening to the ace new Beko DSL compilations. With over 40 tracks by some of the "gnarliest" bedroom musicians you'll come across in this day and age it packs quite the punch (if lo-fi homebeats are your thing).

Anyhoos I was quite captivated by a certain Black Coffee & Cherry Pie's track 'Fountain'



Fountain starts off with just the drums and then starts up a wonderfully catchy lead synth line with a simplified melody slighly nodding in Eurythmics' direction.
It becomes a rapturous piece of IDM. And if that ain't just something that I'm into. Dang nam it. (Note. This is the first time I've used the term intelligent dance music. I'm not comfortable using it and probably never will use it again.)

So ok. I did some internet rummaging and found out that BC&CP is the moniker of a french guy called Albert Murienne. I also found out that you can listen to his mini-album 'Nights At The Mono' on Spotify.
So that's what I did.

You can too

There's a lot more going on "genre-wise" on Nights At The Mono than there is on Fountain. I think I even heard some post-punk in there on 'Messy Kid'. The amount of stuff going on makes the album not the most consistant one I've ever heard, but nevertheless a right treat for my ears.

Now I think the storm's hit this area. I can see trees being all bendy and that.

Laterz

Oh yeah. Apparently the name comes from this

Life in general

Life has been pretty hectic recently. What with desperately trying to find a new flat, being part of the hottest damned festival ever arranged in Sauvo, finding a flat and then moving into it, I really haven't had time to listen/write at all.

Thankfully that's all about to change. (maybe)



Oh yeah the festival went down a treat. Jam packed with artists and bands that you and I may never have heard of, but you can bet your bottom dollar that your mum has heard of them (that is if your mum is a middle aged finnish woman). And she LOVES them.

Seeing as the target audience was what it was, I guess it's just as well we didn't opt for any Turku hardcore bands or pumping electro acts. (Also I guess they're quite hard to pull off done "unplugged")

Seeing as it was such a success, we're doing it all again next year. Maybe we'll have like the Pyramid Stage for your mum's bands and the other stage for your's and my bands.

Brilliant.

Who would YOU like to see live and unplugged in Sauvo?

here's a recap of this years festivities