etnobofin

O’Spada – haunting Södermalm circa 1983 (Images:Pär Olofsson)

O’Spada – Time (unreleased single – Despotz Records)

It’s not yet clear whether reliving every single moment of 1980s pop culture is a good or necessary thing. It is clear, however that the resurrection of the 80s has been underway for at least the past half decade, and there’s not a dang thing we can do about it.

Riding this wave is a band from Stockholm called O’Spada, who design an interesting range of flatpack electro-funk furnishings. Whether they’re inspired primarily by Prince, the Jackson 5 or Justice is a matter for their record label presskit, but by the sound of their upcoming single, Time, they’re a band to watch if you like  spiky, funky synth-pop.

A Nord, played by a Nord

In keeping with their nordic DIY aesthetic, they’ve asked their audience to reconstruct their single to match their own décor. To this end, they have made available to the general public all the raw material from the single, and are asking us amateurs to remix the song, without the help of an allen key or pictorial instructions. The best remixes will be released on a limited-edition pressing of the Time single.

Not one to refuse to make a fool of myself, I had a go, and after several hours of sweating and swearing at Fruity Loops, I put together something resembling a song. It’s not particularly good, the house/broken groove is neither elaborate nor danceable. But it’s the first time I’ve remixed anything or made my own beats. Please be forgiving:

O’Spada – Time (etnobofin’s Clueless Thursday Remix)

The landlady is on holiday, and so she lent me her carkeys for the week. Today was an opportunity to head southwest of Montpellier along some backroads to the lower reaches of the Hérault – the river which gives its name to Montpellier’s départment.

Pézenas is one of the oldest towns in Languedoc, and was spared development in the 19th century when the trainline to Paris was pushed through to Béziers, largely leaving Pézenas wallowing as a sleepy market town. However the place has been well and truly discovered by holiday-makers and the expat retiree set. Saturday is market day, and the license plates in the carpark signalled significant number of shoppers from Nijmegen, Brussels and Düsseldorf.

The crowds in Pézenas were a little oppressive, so after buying a few vegetables for tomorrow’s lunch, I hightailed it south to Agde, where midday was beckoning, and the the cool grey streets were altogether more agreeable and quiet. Reposing beside the river in its unusual sombre stone architecture, Agde is celebrating its 2600th birthday this year (the place was founded as an Ionian Greek colony in 500 B.C.). A shady spot beside the fishing boats provided the perfect venue for lunch: a sandwich jambon beurre and a can of Orangina.

The beach was too close and too tempting to avoid, so a short drive took me to the mouth of the Hérault at Grau d’Agde,  a fairly low-key beach village by Mediterranean standards. Shoes were thrown off and I dipped my pink Anglo-Saxon legs in the sea. Elsewhere on the beach, sandcastles were in progress.

The return loop from Agde took in the baking hot streets of Florensac (where eight years ago I spent a winter holiday with my uncle and aunt), and the remains of the Roman bridge at St Thibéry. The bridge originally carried the traffic of the Via Domitia, linking Spain to Italy, and the bridge remained in use for a thousand years after the Romans left, until a flood in the 16th Century washed part of it away.

The Via Domitia runs through Montpellier, but today its moden equivalent is the A9 autouroute, zooming in an arc through Languedoc parallel to the coast.  After a day driving in the sun, it was this rather faster road that brought me back to Montpellier, just in time to save my Pézenas vegetables from expiring in the heat.

Back in the 1980s, Tip Top Ice Cream advertised its Popsicle iceblocks with a group of animated pop stars, called the “Popsicle band” (a strawberry iceblock played drums, a negroid cola-block played bass etc etc). The Popsicle Band still exist as a marketing campaign, but their title as the “coolest band in the land” has well and truly been usurped by seven musicians from Wellington.

Fat Freddy’s Drop‘s first studio album Based on a True Story went seven times platinum in their home country in 2005. The band has made ripples elsewhere too, with props from DJs like Gilles Peterson and several sell-out tours to Europe under their belt (where tellingly it’s not just expat kiwis in Grey Lynn t-shirts turning up to gigs).

This week,  their second studio album Dr Boondigga and the Big BW got dropped into the pond, complete with right-on vintage Maori ghetto cover artwork by Otis Frizzell. The release is probably a small event in the global scheme of things, but pretty big news in New Zealand.

Fat Freddy’s Drop live at Zenith, Paris in 2008

Is the new album any good? The answer, at least to this pair of ears is: indubitably YES. The sound and approach is more mature, the tunes gel as an album. This is still the downbeat-electro-souljazz-dub-reggae of their previous efforts, but somehow all these dimensions have been pushed further out.

The horns are more in the pocket than ever, Mu‘s beats are deeper and fatter, the soul tunes sound like The Commodores remixed by Sly and Robbie at Parihaka. And perhaps as a recognition that the band now has a 9-year heritage, the horns make a sly reference on Wild Wind to the hook from their 2001 Live at the Matterhorn EP.

Points off? The opening hornline on The Nod which sounds so scarily tripletised when played live, loses some its impact in the studio. And lyrically, I’ve never been satisfied with the bands  “I want to wake up with the sunshine on my face/Yes let’s all live in peace and unity at the beach” themes. But Freddy’s is a dance band, so quibbles about Dallas‘ words are probably missing the point.

Mu at the Roundhouse, 2008 (Photo: Eric Wang)

Early reports indicate that the disc is flying off the shelves in New Zealand faster than the first album. It deserves to, because this is a better album than their studio debut. Pop industry forces will likely militate to ensure that this music doesn’t get as broad an international audience as it deserves, but most kiwis will be content with Fat Freddy’s Drop simply being the coolest band in the land.

You can hear the new album on their site, on theirspace and the album is available as mp3s or as a CD via amplifier.

Dallas Tamaira (Image: Eric Wang)

The Bay

On the road to the bay was a lake of rushes

Where we bathed at times and changed in the bamboos.

Now it is rather to stand and say

How many roads we take that lead to Nowhere,

The alley overgrown, no meaning now but loss:

Not that veritable garden where everything comes easy.

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names

And a hut on the shore by the Maori ovens.

We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek

Or swam in those autumnal shallows

Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs

Upstream, and waiting for the taniwha.

So now I remember the bay and the little spiders

On driftwood, so poisonous and quick.

The carved cliffs and the great outcrying surf

With currents round the rocks and the birds rising.

A thousand times an hour is torn across

And burned for the sake of going on living.

But I remember the bay that never was

And stand like stone and cannot turn away.

-James K. Baxter (1926-1972)

When you live in a certain place, it’s fun sometimes to hear the perspective of someone who is just “passing through”. Tony and Wendy are two British retirees from Lancashire currently caravanning through France. I found their blog via Lost in France.

Their holiday tales are recounted with a good dose of humour, whether describing the lovely weather or the cheapness of the wine in the supermarkets. But, as with many British tourists in France, Tony and Wendy consistently arrive everywhere at lunchtime, and everything is inevitably closed.

When you live in France, lunchtime closing is not something you notice, usually because you’re having lunch yourself (what else is there to do?). Tourists need to learn that lunchtime is important. They shouldn’t be spending that time doing unimportant things like arriving at places.

Anyway, here are a few highlights from their trip so far:

Paris
“…the Pompeidou centre – ugly mess. Finally we get to the Louvre and of course the Mona Lisa. You could spend all day in there, it’s massive, but you can only have so much culture per day so after more religious paintings than you can shake a stick at, along with some fine pottery, we escape to Starbucks for a well earned rest.”

Dogs in Limoges
“The French seem to have this obsession with small dogs – rats on leads – but today we saw the ultimate, a tiny dog in a pouch on the front of a motor bike and the dam thing even had a pair of goggles on. It’s just a pity they don’t know how to pick their dog muck up.”

Social Anthropology in Languedoc
“We really should have kicked the French out of this country, it’s wasted on these miserable specimens. It’s an age profile, the kids are friendly and respectful and chat every time they go past and then you have the elderly French who walk around with faces like a smacked arse and never speak.”

Boules near Perpignan
“Now this isn’t just old men, but it’s a complete cross section of society; all meet up; shaking hands; kissing – a bit dodgy some of that; and taking it all very seriously.”

Beziers
“A place that turns out to be scruffier and more depressing than Blackburn and it’s a nightmare to drive around…. It has a cathedral with fine sculptures, stained glass and frescoes, but it’s surrounded by scaffolding and anyway it’s closed for the most sacred ceremony – lunch. We get to walk through the Muslim quarter, free parking but will the car be there when we get back, very depressing. Not much character, the best bit is the flower market – how it all made us yearn for Blackburn! A few more clues to the place, they’re keen on Rugby and bullfights.”

Montpellier
“Montpellier is one of the nicest cities we’ve been to. Especially if you don’t have to drive around it. It’s a very young thriving city and we visit a place in the centre named the Egg* its full of fancy French style cafe’s, we sit having a coffee it’s opposite the Comedy Opera. Of course it’s MacDonalds, an excellent cup of coffee all for E1.30 and a front row seat for people watching.”

Well, at least they enjoyed Montpellier, even if they did visit McDonalds and witnessed a drugs bust.

Bon voyage, Tony et Wendy, bonne route, et bonne continuation!

*Images used in this post are all my own, and don’t illustrate Tony and Wendy’s trip.

Image: eco-photography

This week’s Rue des Entrepreneurs on France Inter took on the controversial topic of how humans actually make decisions. There were some notable concepts raised: essentially all the recent research throws most traditional assumptions of rationality out the window.

I liked this quote from Jon Elster about the absurdity of groupthink:

Conformity [of belief] can be rational, in the sense that if you observe a large number of people thinking like that, they must doubtless be correct. But if everyone forms their belief in the same way – by observing others – there is no “hard core” [of belief]. For example it’s possible to observe the following situation: where nobody really believes in a certain proposition, but everyone thinks everyone believes in it. And so everyone behaves as if they believe in it.
-Jon Elster, Professor of Rationality and Social Science at the Collège de France

“Le conformisme peut-être rationnel, dans le sens que si l’on observe que beaucoup de gens pensent comme ça, ils doivent sans doute avoir raison. Mais si tous ces autres forment leur croyance de la même manière, en observant autrui, alors il n’y a pas de “noyau dur”. Par exemple on peut constater la situation suivante: que personne ne croit dans la vérité d’une certaine proposition, mais chacun croit que tous les autres y croient. Donc tout le monde se comportent s’ils y croyaient.”
-Jon Elster, professeur au Collège de France, chaire « Rationalité et sciences sociales »

[Ed- thanks to Yann for his corrections to my French transcript]

If you compared this performance (from the 1943 film Stormy Weather) to last week’s Eurovision Song Contest, you could make a strong argument for the general decline in the quality of popular music over the past 60 years. But such a comparison is barely valid, and such a conclusion could never be drawn – surely?

Any musician who’s been in the game for any length of time has stories about extraordinary gigs they’ve played. I was sent this piece yesterday, a description by Paul Desmond of an engagement with the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the Orange County (New Jersey) State Fair.

Dave Brubeck Quartet at Newport, 1956 (via scarlatti2004)

Desmond was not only a talented musician, but widely-read and witty, as evidenced by this report. Here’s an excerpt, and you can download the full 2-page article as a PDF:

Dawn. A station wagon pulls up to the office of an obscure motel in New Jersey. Three men enter – pasty-faced, grim-eyed, silent (for those are their names). Perfect opening shot, before credits, for a really lousy bank-robbery movie? Wrong. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, some years ago, starting our day’s work.

Today we have a contract (an offer we should have refused) for two concerts at the Orange County State Fair in Middletown. 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Brubeck likes to get to the job early.

So we pull up behind this hay truck around noon, finally locating the guy who had signed the contract. Stout, red-necked, gruff and harried (from the old New Jersey law firm of the same name), and clearly more comfortable judging cattle than booking jazz groups, he peers into the station wagon, which contains four musicians, bass, drums, and assorted baggage, and for the first and only time in our seventeen years of wandering around the world, we get this question: “Where’s the piano?”

Read On…[PDF]

Another one of those painfully posed photos, but at least Dave has a piano.

Just finished listening to Chris Lydon’s podcast conversation with George Scialabba. In his analysis of how intellectualism has largely disappeared from view in American society, Scialabba imagines a re-emergence of public conversation about ideas, based on shared locality.

In Scialabba’s opinion, people should be talking about political ideas to each other on the bus, in the coffee shop or at work. The big questions need to be addressed by everybody over a sandwich, rather than assuming that some professor, theologian or journalist is doing it for us.

Central to Scialabba’s argument is the notion that technology is not a replacement for conversation. He points out that most of us still live and/or work in specific physical spaces. The issues and ideas that affect our lives most are necessarily best discussed and solved locally. The internet, while connecting us to ideas and resources globally, could actually be fracturing our ability to identify or deal with the questions that most affect our lives directly.

…some people are on such a fast-track to the future that, when other people are sunk in pre-modern misery, and its just not a healthy prognosis for the species.

-George Scialabba

I wonder if this notion of local debate ties somewhat into my previous post on locally-based economics and its role in community. More thinking required there…

Another interesting idea of Scialabba is that the happy liberal post-modernity in which most of us live is a luxury we can ill afford. Indeed 60-80% of the world’s population are still barely struggling into modernity, both in terms of physical conditions and philosophical ideas. In this context, local conversations become increasingly important because for most humans they are the only tool they have available to better understand their world.

The iPod kids might be characterised as a nation of flighty, ethereal creatures. I’m possibly a card-carrying (if elderly) citizen of this digital Arcadia. We are so comfortable in our multi-tasking, multi-discourse environment that we can no longer identify with those who are not part of the networked world. Perhaps we are also being deafened to the voices closest to us.

(This post is mostly “thinking aloud”. I’m not sure I’ve managed to say anything at all. I’m not even sure if Scialabba is right. But he made me waste an hour writing all this, so that’s some kind of an achievement…)

The weather’s too good this weekend to spend time indoors writing a long blog post. So here’s Another New Zealand Music Month Post, immodestly featuring my old band… I discovered this clip that I didn’t think was online, but someone’s posted it. The song is The Original off our first album. Luckily I don’t appear the clip at all!

Filmed over a weekend on a road near Muriwai beach, in downtown Auckland, and on the cycle path along the Northwestern Motorway… shoestring budgets and digital post-production all the way!