Mono Gig

Magazines like Guitar Player monthly and Total Guitar have always puzzled me a bit. In a way you could possibly equate their fetishising of guitars with the way people buy Car Monthly and Max Power, but really is a Band or an artist not the car, and the guitar just a small part of a greater whole? Are there magazines like Tyre Enthusiast? Brake Light Specialist? Classic Hub Cap Buyer?

Perhaps I'm just being narrow minded. Last night I was faced with a whole room of the type of people who buy these magazines, as I went to a Mono gig, a japanese post-rock band. I had gone to watch them at Scala in the hope that they would be a kind of new version of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the legendary Canadian band, who no longer tour, or make albums.

Their music is a mixture of amazing percussion, with a lot of intricate and powerful guitar work from their three guitarists, building to crashing crescendos, and no vocalist in sight. Its the kind of majestic thing you could score a film with, or as Sigur Ros music has done in the past, a BBC Nature Documentary series. The only problem with this type of music and its drawn out atmospheric nature is that in performance, it needs to be supplemented by either a wealth of different instrumentation, a top notch light show, or hugely charismatic performers with real stage presence. Not two comatose guitarists sitting on stools and a third, female guitarist drugglily swaying along.

The people who had crowded to the front of the stage (an hour an half before anything even started) seemed to absolutely love watching the top strumming action that was happening before them, and were gasping in awe at the classiest fingering since Lady Chatterleys Lover (sorry I couldn’t resist.)

After opening with their latest single, Ashes in the Snow, which is genuinely brilliant and exhilarating, everything kind of took on a formulaic tone, and while good, wasn’t enough to really enliven the mood too much. On the plus side, their drummer was probably worth the price of admission, if only he wasn’t resigned to sitting at the back of the stage, whilst his less active band mates were pushed to the front. I guess Total Guitar has higher sales figures than Drum World.

Topshop In-house Mag shoots

Here's the layouts of the two shoots I did for Nicoles Topshop mag. The theme of the latest edition is New York, in celebration of the New York branch of Topshop opening. I based the look of the first shoot (Night Hawks) on the work of painter Edward Hopper, I wanted to get a cinematic 40s/50s type look, without resorting to the cliched black and white noir look of gangster/detective films. Hoppers paintings of night time in the city have a really distinct atmosphere and a certain palette of colour I wanted to bring to these images.

Many thanks to all the people who sent me New York images for the projections I did in the second shoot (The Calm and the Chaos), it was much appreciated. My Mums and Kambi's were the ones that got used in the final images.

Trumpet

I'm still persisting with Lost. Watching it recently has been like trying to untangle a ball of string or some small twisted chains. Not neccesarily mentally taxing, sometimes slightly irratating, sometimes rewarding, but with the overriding feeling that you could be doing something better with your time.

I havent been bothered to research the plot in depth (although you can online, to mind crunching detail), but with names like Farraday, John Locke, Hume etc the writers seem to be linking the characters with famous philisophical and scientific figures from history, in what I imagine they think is some kind of impressively deep, multi layered comment on science and faith. In reality previous series sometimes felt like an A-level piece of creative writing, with the writer poring over a thesaurus and encyclopedia ramming stuff in.

The ramming seems to have slowed down though recently, and there has been a gradual unravelling of some of the (semi) puzzling plotlines from the series, and while this is satisfying in a sense, it seems to be revealing more mysticism and faith than it does science, which is such a cop-out. If there is a 'some questions science just cant answer' type conclusion I will shit.

If Lost is the fancy-dan, alice band wearing, tackle avoiding, creative midfielder of the popular sci-fi drama series world, then Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is the journey man utility midfielder, chugging along, never too ambitious, but always dependable. A bit like a Danny Murphy to Losts Luka Modric.

Sometimes it flirts with interesting ideas; humans educating artificial AI, humans feeling lust for robots, dealing with a future you know you can't avert, etc. However, just as its about to really get interesting, it pulls away to more traditional 'Terminator incessantly chasing people down corridors' scene, or a 'Two Terminators smashing each other about a bit' scene. Luckily these kind of scenes are always accompanied by the brilliant theme music from the films, which essentially sounds like a Terminator making slow, painful love to a trumpet.

Top 5 New York Bands

This is a small piece I wrote for Nicoles Topshop thing -

A Place to Bury Strangers
If you're going to a A Place To Bury Strangers gig, its probably worth taking ear plugs. Not in a bad way, but just so your ears are suitably protected enough so that the next time you go to a gig they are actually working. Their extremely loud sound gives nods to The Jesus and Mary Chain and XTRMNTR era Primal Scream, with layers of guitar fuzz and feedback, and a dark, nihilistic atmosphere.

Yeasayer
Remember those student musicians who used to sit underneath the trees outside their University Halls, strumming a guitar, reeking of incense and talking about how much they love Fela Kuti maaaan. They wish they could be even a tenth as inspired as the eclectic, multicultural sound of Yeasayer. The chants and rich instrumentation of their album All Hour Cymbals build a really amazing atmosphere without ever resorting to cheap grandiose melodrama.

Les Savy Fav
Having kicked about for over a decade, Les Savy Fav arent a new band, or even a massively successful one, but are very much worthy of your attention. Their style seems to shift dramatically with every track, sometimes sharp, dreamy indie pop, sometimes blisteringly hard rock, perhaps due Tim Harringtons superb if slightly crazed stage persona. Imagine a toughened up 70s era Elton John who started life as a beer swilling lumberjack, and you're probably not that close.

Amazing Baby
If there was one song from the current New York indie scene that you simple must go out of your way to listen to, it would be Amazing Baby’s ‘Supreme Being’. Woozy, ethereal, and electrifying all at the same time, it really is a great way to spend four minutes. The bands other work seems to jump between sounding like either MGMT’s dropout buddies (which they are), or Vampire Weekend doing T.Rex, which when you think about it, could never be a bad thing.

Crystal Stilts
They are probably the least accessible of the bands mentioned here. Their singer cant sing. Their name is absolutely awful. Their sound isn’t even particularly original, and is heavily influenced by The Velvet Underground, Brianjonestown Massacre, and (again) The Jesus and Mary Chain. But somehow, Crystal Stilts really, really work. At the very least, you will never, ever hear their music scoring an advert for a crap hatchback.