I’m not going to be posting here any more, as I’ve bought a URL and some web space and am going to make some attempt at doing this thing properly. My new blog is over at www.thespiderhill.com, so please readjust your bookmarks, feeds and very kind links accordingly.

The new space is going to be principally getting me back into doing what I love most, which is listening to loads of music and then spewing out bile or joy dependent on my reaction. There’ll be the odd bit of other stuff in there, but it’s mostly a space for me to go on and on AND ON about music until you’re all sick of me. ENJOY.

www.thespiderhill.com

Here are a few photos from yesterday’s recording session…

Unfortunately, since basic WordPress seems to hate you embedding anything, I can’t stick it directly in here, which is quite frustrating. Go and have a play, though.

It should be an interesting process for me particularly, as I’ve never done a ‘traditional’ recording in a proper band with live drums. Recording with Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element simply means me separating out all the individual electronic drums sounds into separate tracks, which I can do from the comfort of my own bed, then playing some guitar and synth parts over the top. A bit like a techno-guitar Milli Vanilli.

And recording with The Evenings I overdubbed my keyboard parts (have a listen over here) on top of band recordings already done without me being there.

This time around, we’ll mic up the drum kit, put everyone’s guitar parts through amp modellers/pods, play through headphones while we record the drums and scratch guitar tracks. Then re-record each guitar part properly, at volume. And we have eight hours to nail two or even three tunes, which will be tight.

Sunday will be mixing at my house, interspersed with Mario Kart Wii and a nice roast dinner being cooked by the bassist.

I’ll report back with some pictures and stuff, and of course the finished tracks when they’re done, but in the meantime here’s a rehearsal recording of one of the songs we’re recording, called ‘Compliance’. It was recorded with a little MP3 recorder in the corner of the practice room, hence the distinctly lo-fi quality.

Hope you had a great new year. I’ve promised myself I’ll post at least three times a week, so more over the next couple of days.

Any other highlights of 2008 you could recommend for me to check out?

1. Portishead – Third

This was going to be number one in my list from the first moment I heard it. It’s magnificent, groundbreaking music with everything from krautrock and Silver Apples to scratched old soul records and swish futuristic techno. It made me think differently about music to some extent, and I can’t praise it any more highly than that.

2. Earth – The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull

This is just wonderful – big, long droning monoliths with every single note deliberate and crystal clear. It’s doomy and sludgy, but manages to combine that with beauty and a real light touch.

3. Avrocar – Against The Dying Of The Light

Affable ambient Brummies who quietly go about creating some of the most gorgeous electronic music in the world, while virtually no one notices. This is superb stuff, and, even better, accompanied by a lovely hand-written letter from the band when I bought the album. You just don’t get that from Brian Eno.

4. Zombie Zombie – A Land For Renegades

I first heard of this band when I was offered a show by them on their UK tour last year, but we didn’t have space to put them on. But the press material got me salivating. So here’s a band with ‘zombie’ in the name TWICE, who are synth-driven krautrock lovers from the same musical school as Holy Fuck? Yes please! Daft Punk meets Neu!

5. Glasvegas – Glasvegas

Allow me to join the massed ranks of critics gathered to worship at the feet of Glasvegas. I fell in love with ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart’ as soon as I heard the demo version. They were terrific on the three occasions I saw them live this year (including a show at the little Jericho Tavern that I’m sure will drift into Oxford music folklore in a couple of years). And the album is so good that it doesn’t collapse beneath the weight of hype dumped on top of it before it was released. Anyone know if the Christmas record is any good? All the record shops here have run out of copies…

6. Fujiya & Miyagi – Lightbulbs

Absolutely more of the same from Fujiya & Miyagi. I’d have no trouble believing these songs were done at the sametime as Transparent Things – they’re so similar to the first record. Thankfully the first record was terrific and this is also great. Not for me to worry about where they head next, and ‘Knickerbocker’ is my favourite sing-along-in-the-shower pop song of the year.

7. The Bug – London Zoo

An album I bought purely on the strength of critical praise and the fact that your man there had something to do with Techno Animal/Godflesh, apparently. And it’s a real treat, going from pretty brutal breakbeats and seriously heavy bass to lighter, ragga-inflected stuff, frequently within the same track. This is far and away the most, umm, ‘zeitgeist’ record on the list, for want of a better term.

8. American Music Club – The Golden Age

Not a patch on Love Songs For Patriots as far as I’m concerned – it really seems to lack some of that heartfelt despondency and rawness. But what it lacks in that area it makes up for in being really rather pretty and charming, and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Decibels and the Little Pills’ and ‘Windows on the World’ are up there with any of their vintage material. Shame there’s a fair bit of filler on there too, though.

9. Kid606 – Die Soundboy Die

Technically only an EP, but in here because it is EXCELLENT. I’ve already reviewed this and you can see what I thought of it over here. Bags of fun, basically, and his live set at Audioscope was bang on form.

Kid606 live at Audioscope from thespiderhill on Vimeo.

10. Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element – More Than 20 per cent

Yeah, I know. I’m in the band. But if you can’t put your own record into your own top ten records that affected your life this year, then something’s up. And there’s some good stuff here – the live tracks sound good and clangy, and there are some great remixes. My favourites are by Karhide, Space Heroes of the People and Kosmische. BONUS TREAT for blog readers – get your hands on some free Sunnyvale MP3s over here.

If you take From Light To Sound and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element out of the mix (at # 2 and #4 in the list respectively), because I play in those bands so end up listening to band practices, live recordings, demos and all sorts all the time, then my top ten looks like the list below. Bit skewed, as itobviously only takes into account what I’ve listened to in front of my computer, and also lots of what I happen to have on my work laptop (loads of Mogwai apparently):

1. American Music Club (hmm, will they ever not top one of my lists? I’m such a sap for Eitzel. Plus I stalked them on tour and now they are close personal friends*.)

2. The Paper Chase (new entry after seeing them live for the first time and going WOAAAH, and also after listening to them on repeat during a bad start to the year.)

3. Cat Power (I really don’t remember listening to her much this year, and I didn’t like Jukebox.)

4. Stereolab (Definite resurgence this year, and off to see them live tomorrow, yay! Hope they play the krauty exciting stuff not the louche boring French-pop.)

5. Mark Eitzel (see 1.)

6. Kid606 (New EP is outstanding, and got a revival once we booked him for Audioscope.)

7. Mogwai (Don’t even like ‘em that much, just have loads on my PC for some reason.)

8. Killing Joke (I have no memory of listening to them loads this year.)

9. Death Cab For Cutie (Whining indie sap.)

10. Einstuerzende Neubauten (Must have been during a clangy April/May.)

So there you go – a mostly- meaningless chart that isn’t a true reflection of what I’ve loved this year, and which took a year to compile. I wonder how this would compare with a top ten list I drew up from memory…

*Or quite possibly afraid of me.

Size/practicality

Great. It’s small enough to slip into your pocket and quick enough to boot up that you won’t miss things that happen quickly – compare this with mobile phone video, which often means you pressing seven or eight combinations of buttons before you even get into video mode. It runs off AA batteries rather than a bespoke battery that needs charging up, iPod style, which is hugely beneficial if you’re travelling, and also don’t want to be carrying around yet another charger with you. Similarly, the USB arm flips out of the side of the camera, so again there are no extra leads. One downside is that you can’t rotate the USB arm, so if your USB ports are vertical rather than horizontal, you have to do some awkward laptop elevation to get the videos off there. You can buy a USB extension cable to get round this, but everything else is designed so well that you’d think this would have been thought of.

Capacity/battery life

It holds up to an hour of video as a pretty standard-sized AVI, which is plenty really. Battery life promised up to four hours, but in reality sits nearer the three-hour mark. Still plenty of time to watch back your footage and delete bits you don’t want.

Software

Software for very basic editing is included on the Flip, so if all you really want to do is take short clips and whack them online, you can do it straight out of the box. The ‘movie mix’ feature, which blends together several clips into a short movie, is okay but not great. You can’t, for instance, replace the audio with your own soundtrack, and you have no choice about how the scenes are faded into one another. Still, what do you expect? You can always use Windows Movie Maker or something similar to get better results.

Picture quality

You’re not going to get anything broadcast/TV quality, let’s make that clear. But for online video, the quality is just fine, and much better than any mobile phone video currently out there. When you’re moving quickly, e.g. in a car, foreground stuff whizzes by extremely quickly and distorts a bit, giving the impression you’re watching speeded-up film. But middle-distance stuff looks perfect. The camera also copes surprisingly well with poor lighting conditions – it can get a half decent picture under most conditions.

The viewfinder/playback screen is really quite small. It’s fine for shooting but watching clips back can be a bit of a struggle. There’s an A/V out so you can play back on a TV or monitor, which given the resolution of the picture, also holds up surprisingly well.

With the tripod (an extra £10 or so), you can get a lovely steady shot, too, and it also functions as an extremely basic monopod to steady up your hand-held shooting. Really useful.

Minus points are the zoom. It’s a weak digital zoom that distorts the picture as soon as you start using it, so you might as well forget zooming in on anything.

Sound quality

A real strength compared to what else is on the market in the same price range, or compared to mobiles. I doesn’t like wind whipping across the mic (but what audio kit does?), but at loud volumes like gigs, it simply compresses the sound right down so you don’t get a huge mess of white noise, but can actually pick out what’s going on. And sound for natural background noise, conversation etc. is perfectly clear.

The biggest oversight is a lack of audio out/headphone socket, so you can’t listen back easily to the sound on what you’ve recorded. Sound only plays back through the on-board speaker, which is not powerful, so you need to be somewhere quiet to play back, and even then you don’t get a true representation of the sound.

Reliability

Looks plasticky and cheap, but is quite robust. The only problem I’ve had was having it in my pocket all day in 30oC heat, it became a little temperamental and didn’t switch on immediately, until it’d cooled down and the moisture had evaporated. Best to keep it in a bag or loose coat pocket, then.

On the whole, though, this thing is £80, and for the price, both the picture and sound quality are actually excellent, and you can pull good quality stuff for the web together in no time at all, whether it’s quick grabs of bands performing or from the field footage of humanitarian emergencies.

See below for a couple of clips, one from a recent gig, and one from my recent travels (see my earlier post), so you can see for yourself how the Flip holds up in different situations.

One minor point that got me interested is when she says, with reference to Play, that ‘Historically, if you look at the terms of constructed authenticity in popular music, you’ll find that Moby gets out of certain aspects of it because it is electronic music; it’s not rock ’n’ roll. It doesn’t have the same stakes in the art-vs.-commerce debate that rock ’n’ roll might.’

And thinking about it, that’s probably true, although my initial reaction was to bristle at the implication that electronic music is any less valid sitting at the ‘art’ end of an art vs. commerce debate than Nick Drake, for instance. While I wouldn’t agree that it’s necessarily more suited to adverts per se (depends what you’re looking for), I suppose electronica principally (or at least popularly) comes from the same era as music in advertising, so there may not be quite the same feeling of outrage in hearing Amon Tobin or DJ Shadow on an ad for the first time as there might be from hearing The Stones or Led Zep. And what of lyrics? Does having lyrical content of any kind necessarily create a closer connection with a piece of music, such that when you hear it out of context in an advert, you react badly. Or does this opinion just come from that baseless, myopic school of thought, still bewilderingly popular fifteen years after LFO’s first album, that says electronic music is artificial and digital, and can therefore not be constructed with heart and emotion? And since it has no heart or feeling behind it, then its place is in hawking products and backing trailers for ITV drama?

Even so, in the case of Moby specifically, I doubt it gets him out of the debate because it’s electronic music, but rather because Play is a dead-eyed, soulless Great White of an album. Eugh.