Yes I've been away for what seems like forever. Sorry about that.
I can't stay for long though because that essay on cyclodextrins isn't going to write itself. Unfortunately.

"So what are the main developments since we last heard from you T-Bone?" you're all asking.

Here they are:

I downloaded Grimes' Halfaxa album for free from Arbutus Records and it's ace. Like the minimalist "post-dubstep" Lykke Li.

Grimes - Devon by Arbutus Records


Ok so the next major development is that The Dum Dum Girls AND Black Lips are playing in Turku in July. Holy crap! The kind of double bill that's sure to return some happiness that was sucked out of your life by the European Food Chemistry Conference XVI in Gdansk, Poland. That is if any of you "lucky" people are going...
They're playing Helsinki's Nosturi on Tuesday 12.7 and Turun Klubi the day after (13.7)

The next bit of ace news is that Hauschka's (who's playing at Flow this year) new album Salon Des Amateurs is wicked good. Making classical danceable music which is pretty much literally vibe-ing my pants off. "Ya, play ze music Mr. German piano man, ya."



First and foremost however, it's almost Great Escape time. I'm ready to escape great. Let's do this. Brighton town here I come baby (well, soon anyway)

This was almost an entirely pointless post. I just felt like I needed to get back on here and do my thing. I felt as though me and my baby AndygoesdowntoChinatown were growing apart. It's not you baby, it's me. I'm sorry. You need more attention? Ok, I'm gonna try. Sometimes you know it's just so hard. Sometimes it's just so hard to have you, Andy, and at the the same time be a healthy man with social contacts.

Meltdown time

Everyone I know, internet-wise or real life-wise is having a total facebook/real life meltdown due to Sunday's Finnish parliamentary election results. It makes for amusing conversations and if we're to believe what people are saying then Finland is about to experience a mass exodus. It remains to be seen whether some celebrity art-world figure will rise up and part the Baltic Sea to lead his/her people to the promised land (Sweden). It's gonna be beautiful.

But for the time being, I'm not going to haul myself out of here. If this election results in some kind of nazi-zombie-holocaust-apocalypse type scenario, I reckon I've played enough Fallout/Resident Evil to survive it. If needed I can give you some tips too.

#1 With all this radiation coming from Japan, Russia and even from the motherfunking ground we stand on it's probably time to gear up and prepare yourself. Forget iodide tablets, they cost way too much. Just loot any dead astronauts you might come across and take their space suits. You'll instantly get something like +40 % radiation resistance.

#2 If the right-wing True Finns succeed in their plans to build an apocalyptic scale harbinger of death superweapon that for some reason uses natural renewable energy, all you have to do is reroute its energy system so that, instead of killing all those people, it sends all that lovely juicy solar power to the people. You know for electricity and such. The people will be happy.

#3 Never leave your house. You should have already prepared for this situation by filling your tiny flat with enough provisions to last you your entire life and by building your own treadmill power generator. Because you simply cannot leave your house or answer you door. Who knows what kind of bodysnatchers or zombies or even worse TV-licence inspectors or Jehova's witnesses are there just waiting for that one simple mistake.


Enough of my survival tips.

What I really want to hear is the people's voice.
Every great governmental disappointment has resulted in music. Am I right?

"AARgh Monarchy is SHIT! Aaargh Margaret Thatcher is SHIT!" by The Sex Pistols

"George Bush and war are totally like not cool man!" by Green Day

"!!AARGhh I HATE TV revolutions!" by Gil Scott-Heron

Will Finland have its own anti-True Finn voice? We'll see. Exciting times.

Record Store Day hangover

Yesterday was International Record Store Day. Hundreds, thousands maybe even millions of super rare, unique re-pressings of classic albums, singles and EPs were available to spend your precious cash on. But you'd best hurry because that exclusive remix 7" you've always wanted/needed is going, GOING, GONE. Quicker than you can say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with a spoonful of sugar in your mouth.

So

What did you do on Record Store Day 2011?

Maybe you got an ultra deluxe chameleon-esque colour changing Joan Jett vinyl made of, not vinyl, but hummingbird feathers?

Or did you get that "so one-of-a-kind" Justin Timberlake T-shirt that's "so one-of-a-kind" there's only one size and, no, even though you're not anywhere near size XXS damn it you'll still wear it just to show how "Love stoned" you are?

Or did you just get that superace 10" of that mega-rad hardcore punk band doing Scarlett Johansson covers blended with afrobeat and barbershop?

Personally I just played a lot of Tekken 6. So much that my thumb hasn't been this sore since I was 15 (Tekken 3).

Sorry Record Store Day for not joining in this year. But if I've got to choose between eating the next day and getting an exclusive remix 7" then I say food wins. Well at least this year it did.

+ They dispatched my Cymbals LP yesterday. I guess that could as a Record Store Day purchase.

Hot Sauce

I'm going through a phase.

You know that phase where you put tabasco sauce on everything, regardless of whether it's edible or not? Yeah, I've got that now. Tabasco completes everything. Tabasco completes me. I'm a man, but I'm also part tabasco. Tabasco runs through my veins making me stronger, making me super.

Just thought I'd share that.

And with no smooth transition whatsoever here's the new video for the song White Wolves by Canadians Bravestation off their EP from last summer. One of my favourite EPs of the year btw.



You can download the EP for free from their Bandcamp site
http://bravestation.bandcamp.com/album/ep

oh and here's a sweet Talking Heads cover
This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) | Talking Heads cover by Bravestation

My Super Sweet 16 and a bit.

Last weekend was my birthday weekend and instead of my parents getting me the "superest" party this town's ever seen + a diamond encrusted SUV that would make even Naomi Campbell blush, my parents didn't get me a party or the "swag-wagon" of my dreams.

I did however learn a few things about life, stuff and even a bit about music. Because surely that's the point of growing up/old? You learn some stuff, do some stuff and then take all that stuff and use it up in the old catamaran of heaven. (or Charon's rubber dinghy if you've been a bit of a bastard)

The whole point of this post is to inform you lot about my new found wisdom.

So firstly.

No matter how hard you think you can party, there's always someone who can come along, take your "super-hard-party-skills", devour them, wash 'em down with a dirty beer mat and vomit them all over the walls of your "happy-place". Just to show you that you ain't got nothing on them.

Next I discovered the wonders of social media and its 'slang'. Of course it's a great feeling when people are congratulating your survival of yet another year on this planet. You (I) feel super popular when your Facebook-wall gets mobbed by literally the entire universe proclaiming their everlasting love and joyous wishes. Your close friends, your friends, your "other" friends and then that guy whose request you accepted because some woman in the background of his profile picture was showing some cleavage and you just had to check it out.

Oh and maybe (or not) the funniest thing, and I've never seen this before, is people who just write "HBD" on your wall. That's like for people who kind of want to congratulate you on something, but just can't be arsed to type in all those characters. Maybe a bit like someone who, in person, instead of actually saying "happy birthday" (see, even I could be arsed to type it) just gives you the thumbs up coupled with a really smug grin.

I'm going to start using HBD, along with other acronyms on Facebook. Just need get the gist of it first:

Guy whose request you accepted because some woman in the background of his profile picture was showing some cleavage and you just had to check it out:
-Oh no! My cat's just climbed up a huge tree and I can't climb up to get poor Veronica Mars because of my hereditary I-can't-climb-trees-due-to-fear-of-trees+cats-combo disease.

Me:
-ON! HYTCTFB? MICHABML? ILDHTD...

Made up acronyms and social media. Hit or miss? We'll find out soon.

This post's length is getting out of hand so to finish it off. Here's the last thing that I learnt. Perhaps even the most important thing I'll ever learn.


This song goes "It's a hard knock life" and not however the hell I always sing it.

Thanks for your time.
Might return with some music soon.
HBD everyone!

D/R/U/G/S

"Drugs are cool." "Just say yes." "There's no harm in Drugs."

These are three quotes that I didn't hear from my parents when growing up.
But you know, I'm a big boy now, and I can decide for myself. I think.

And I think D/R/U/G/S' new Love/Lust 12" totally kills it. Out in May as a physical release, it's already up on Soundcloud to check out.

There's a certain sound going on here that just makes me think:

sweat-drenched late-as-you-can-get dancefloor, drinking Smirnoff ices topped up with vodka just because there isn't anything else to get your hands on but still calling yourself a real man. Dreading the next day because you'll get to sleep 2 hours on the floor of a train and then spend the next day doing team building excercises with people who throw up on you in the middle of the night.


or

so-early-in-the-morning-that-the-postman's-ashamed-of-your-lumbering-intoxicated-dance-moves. Yeah the sun's been up for hours, but that isn't going to stop you climbing across the ruins of a soon-to-be-demolished bridge naked. Normal people going to work, or walking their dogs, kids pointing at you going "mummy, what's he doing?" as you fall off a longboard, naked.

Good vibes. Good times.

Love / Lust 12" by D/R/U/G/S

Flow Festival baby, yeah!

Today it finally happened. The artists for this year's Flow Festival in Helsinki were announced and holy moly is this a wicked awesome day to wake up and breathe in that ever so slightly drizzly air. Yessir! After the show Ruisrock are gonna be putting out this summer it seems Helsinki HAD to go one step further, pull out all the stops and beat its lil' baby euro-culture-capital city and announce the best alternative music festival Finland has ever seen (well at least in my time here).

I think it's pretty safe to say that if the weather ain't gonna be hot, well at least the tunes will. For the full line-up go here:
http://www.flowfestival.com/esiintyjat/

Now I'm just going to list some of my personal highlights. Incredible.


There's the odd chance I'll see Warpaint in Brighton next month, but I'm still hugely bitter after missing them a year ago, so maybe I'll just see them as many times as I can to make up for it. Oh and because they're brilliant.
Undertow by warpaintwarpaint



Lykke Li should be essential live listening, purely because her first album played such a part in molding this "identity" of mine.
I Follow Rivers by LykkeLi


Hauschka from Germany makes these immensely beautiful piano-driven classical tunes and I've always said people don't listen to classical music enough. Be it because concert halls usually have an awfully stuck up atmosphere or not, I don't know.
Hauschka - Alexanderplatz by Hauschkamusic


Pantha Du Prince (also German) and his amazing Black Noise album kind of became my minimalistic soundtrack of last winter. So looking forward to seeing him do his thang.
The Splendour by Pantha du Prince

These would have been more than enough to secure my 100+whatever euros for the weekend, but no they're also giving us:

James Blake



Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti'



and only bloody Kanye West!

Kanye West - Monster .

See you there!

Errors + Microsoft Encarta

I just realized why I know pretty much everything about everything.



Thanks to Microsoft Encarta 95 I'm actually a genius. Yep, Encarta enlarged my 8-10 year old brain by roughly 300% and it's no coincidence that I keep coming in 4th place in the local pub quiz. 4th place isn't last, sometimes it's not even second to last so obviously the Mindmaze did have some effect on my pre-pubescent neural development. Oh mindmaze how I miss you!

The 'mind maze'

Obviously after finding Encarta again I went on a long old nostalgic trip down computer game memory lane. Remembering stuff I'd forgot even existed. I'm talking Commander Keen, Monkey Island, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, CIVILIZATION II (Oh My GOD!), Heroes of Might and Magic and even Pokemon!

Wow, I wish I could be that awesome nerdy kid again. I feel bad for kids these days who have to play larger than life shoot 'em ups and RPGs with super life-like graphics without needing a controller or even a basic vocabulary. Things have changed since the likes of Police Quest or Leisure Suit Larry, where you had to type in all the commands, and if you didn't know what a 'nightstick' or a 'condom' was you weren't getting anywhere.

Ahem, I was actually supposed to post something about Errors and their new single Magna Encarta. I guess the Encarta in there sidetracked me a little.


Magna Encarta is the first new song by Errors after their Come Down With Me album from last year and it's coupled by the b-side Ganymede. Both tracks are going for a more epic lengthier sound to anything on CDWM, but in no way is this a bad thing. Just different.

Magna Encarta by Errors

The single's up on spotify, but I haven't got the link for it so find it yourself. Kids these days, eh? Need everything done for them. Everything handed on a silver plate. Ptooey.

Yournalist

I felt really down and super tired after a distinctly average weekend that somehow seemed to suck the life and soul out of me.
So today I left uni early, had a three hour nap and woke up to an e-mail telling me to listen to Yournalist.

This was good in three ways:

1. Yournalist are from Finland. Might not add to the long list of blogged bands, but never seen live.
2. Yournalist are from Turku, ie. the city I live in, giving me a sense of having an actual local music scene, which I wasn't completely aware of earlier.
3. Their song Nigerian Girl off their up 'n' coming EP Slippery & Infected is well good.

There are some pretty catchy, summery vibes floating around here doing their business and wiping the sleepy dust outta my eyes so that I get back to the "important stuff" (reading long and tedious scientific articles about eating various different strains of bacteria)

Check, em out. (Yournalist, not the probiotics) They quote Vampire Weekend, The White Stripes and The Beatles as their influences. See if you can spot them.

Yournalist - Nigerian Girl by drinktonightrecords

Circuit Des Yeux

If you want to listen to what I'd imagine the tiny little man inside my head would sound like if he was going absolutely flippin' insane, then I'd recommend you listen to Circuit Des Yeux's album Sirenum.

Sirenum on Spotify

For some reason Circuit Des Yeux aka. Haley Fohr is going for a slightly-easier-on-the-mental-health kind of sound for her 3rd album Portrait out in May on De Stijl Records.
Her track 3311 off the new album could even be described as a lo-fi pop ballad. Her previous songs probably couldn't.

Circuit Des Yeux : 3311 by destijlrecs

New Husky Rescue video + remix comp

Hi there.

It's been quite hard to write a blog which generally focuses on new music, when I've been pretty actively trying to avoid new music for a while now. Don't know why, don't know how, but if I want to keep on being the most relevant music person in the universe and keep getting 2 trillion page views per hour, I'd best put my game-underpants back on, step up, take the shot and home-run that the s**t out of that bitch. (apologies if my baseball terminology is incorrect)

OMG I just set fire to my face! Oh s**t!
(haha april fool's, got ya)

So yeah Husky Rescue are re-releasing last year's Ship of Light album as a 3-disk box set extravaganza on April 18th. Look at it, it's so cute!


And coincidently Husky Rescue have just got a new video for their song Fast Lane, off Ship of Light.



OMG my arm just got chopped off in a freak snowball-fight accident!!
(april fool's. Got ya again)

And also coincidently (too many coincidences going around, coincidence?) Husky Rescue have got a remix competition going on. That's right, plucky wannabe remixers can test their might by downloading the stems to the album's singles and making new original tunes from old original tunes.
Such as the likes of this one

Husky Rescue - We Shall Burn Bright (Original) by Catskillsrecords

Go and do so here:
http://heresmymix.com/huskyrescue/