over the weekend i spent twenty-eight hours with my eyes wide open as can be at wild in the country which was pretty bangin' on the whole (especially the mighty justice, who only went and fucking dropped killing in the name of at the end of their set!), yet despite being a wholly enjoyable ex-per-i-ence in terms of the ol' musicality it was also a wholly soggy and muddy experience in terms of the weather.

well, i know people say "it's not a festival if you don't get your nice trainers caked brown" but, y'know, i don't think the patrons sunning themselves at coachella or benicassim look like they're missing out on anything so, um, that's bullshit and the fact still remains that it’s fucking july and the sun should be out but it’s not despite the fact that it was a-shining with all its might a few weeks ago when I was doing exams…which would’ve been more ironic if i was ostensibly a fan of sunny weather.

but fuck, i can’t deny that aside from the discomfort of the heat there really is nothing like sun gracing human skin to rouse up ineffable feelings of joy and endless potential and, while the sun may not be out i recently discovered a laptop wizard whose music sounds like what the great gaseous ball in the sky may listen to if anthropomorphised.

the wizard in question is sabrepulse and the track which i think the sun would most appreciate is skyfire ace this track gave me the same feeling that i got when i first saw peter jackson's braindead: it just gets better and better and when you think it really can't get any better it just ups it a notch and the baby splits open a woman's head. pure genius.

so, in the name of suncream making t-shirts sticky; feeling superior to people with hayfever and chicks wearing less clothes here's summer in an mp3:

sabrepulse - skyfire ace (from chipbreak wars)

viva le sunburn!

nullsleep is my boyfriend
nullsleep is my girlfriend
nullsleep is my dead end
nullsleep is my imaginary friend
nullsleep is my brother
nullsleep is my great-grand-daughter
nullsleep is my sister
nullsleep is my favorite mistress

i love nulsleep
oh golly gosh i really do love nullsleep.

if his music was a girl it’d be the type of girl that you’d never ever mentally defile because she’s so beautiful and perfect.

nullsleep - her lazer light eyes (from teh choons)

nullsleep - on target (from electric heart strike)

nullsleep - friends bring you up

get more of his music for free because he's such a standup guy

so i was walking down the street today and this fucking skinhead brickie over the road up some scaffolding was like “get your hair cut!” and when I looked over at him he just stared at me dead-eyed and repeated himself and it’s like was he being ironic and consciously clichéd or does he genuinely think he’s being witty or original because seriously, it’s a sorry existence he’s living if he’s just dumbly going through the motions of shouting such dull abuse because he thinks the fact that he’s a skinhead brickie dictates that he does. people like him should be pitied or ignored or given the lethal injection, but they certainly shouldn’t be admired and given money to make records, as is the case with the twang.

i find few things in the world more depressing than the twang, they’re the antithesis of what music should be. music shouldn’t be dull tales of lager louts on a friday night. music, whether it’s made by wolfgang a. mozard or richard d. james, should be purely escapist and evocative of deep emotions, whether that emotion be deepest sorrow or elated joy. the latter of which architecture in helsinki do exceptionally well and their new album (especially the preceding single, heart it races) is no exception to this rule, even if cameron does seem to have developed his vocal palate to a cross between antony hegarty and the bloke out of the b-52s at times. enjoy.

architecture in helsinki - heart it races

buy it

so yeah, if i was religious and believed in a world that made sense with a nice purpose and happy ending and a big friendly man in the sky that loved me and all the rest of his children except for the ones who were male and liked to stick bits of each other into each other i would probably wonder whatever the point of ugly chicks was, because i’m pretty sure that no big ol’ deity in their right mind would create them. they serve no purpose except for to remind us that it could be worse, there could be more (that is except for if you’re in great yarmouth).

anyway, i got served in woolworths by a proper ugly chick the other day and while i was in there i decided to take a cursory look over their cds and realised that i actually hated EVERYTHING there. seriously, there was very little there which I didn’t actively dislike and this made me wonder whatever the fuck happened to pop music, because i would’ve thought that woolworth’s stock would be about as mainstream as they come but it was entirely composed of dull indie bands and slick r&b.

i’m sorry, but when the fuck did chart music get so worthy? has everyone forgotten when pop came brightly coloured from scandinavia with dance moves for the jailbaits to learn?

well I haven’t, and in the honour of taking it way back i decided to rejig some nostalgia. enjoy.

whigfield - saturday night (the boho grow intro's fuck my disco remix)

buy the original (Ha Ha)

i am very much upset and have been for the past few days because, in a cruel twist of fate, i will not be on these green and pleasant lands on the 20th to 22nd of august when mr. tom jenkinson will be “taking a computer and just bustin the computer open and making some music out of it” at glade – which would be worth the ticket price alone if the rest of the lineup wasn’t also so fucking killer, they got everyone from vsnares to scotch egg up in there.

in an effort to fend off this depression i’ve been trying to formulate some logic within my brain which dictates that squarepusher isn’t actually the greatest musical genius of all time and the fact that i have never EVER seen him live isn’t a heinous omission from my lifestory punishable by death but it’s just not working so instead i’ve decided to orate in the form of five reasons just why he’s such a fucking genius, after each of which i’ve posted a track by him which illustrates the point but isn’t as venerated as songs with a video by chris Cunningham, which seems to be all most people care about in terms of idm really (“aphex twin? Oh shit yeah he’s fucked up, you seen the come to daddy video?” – yeah shut the fuck up)

1. his attention to melody is just as intricate and perfectly contrived as his attention to spasmodic skitzoid drum programming. with nothing but his good friend roland mr. jenkinson can weave a tune which sounds like the future but feels as warm and familiar as the past.

squarepusher - tomorrow world (from selection sixteen)

2. he does insanity just as insanely as the most insane end of the breakcore spectrum yet even when he’s assaulting your ears and melting your brain it never sounds detatced and ironic or offensive, but always gleeful and inclusive, like he himself says if you don’t appreciate his shizat the only possible reason is that you’re “stupid and stubborn”

squarepusher - go! spastic (from go plastic)

3. i’m a traditionalist, me, I like my rockers drug-addled and debauches and my electronic wizards nerdy and obsessive, so I always find it very disheartening when there’s an interview with the latter and they seem to be moronic wreckheads like many of their fans. Luckily, though, tommy fits quite neatly into the “nerdy and obsessive” category as his ten-million page long manifresto in the do you squarepusher liner notes can attest. in interviews he often seems unassuming and quite bemused by the extent of his godlike status and desperate to get back to his reclusive existence, meddling with circuit boards and finding new sounds a bass guitar can make when plugged into five laptops and ten distortion pedals. or something.

squarepusher - do you know squarepusher (from do you know squarepusher)

4. in addition to being a master of the beat and bleep, quite unlike any of the other paradigms of idm, tom jenkinson is also a virtuoso jazz musician. On bass, of course, he IS the fucking daddy but he’s also been known to drop some guitar both electric and acoustic and when not beating the fuck out of the amen break he’s a very talented sticksman too.

squarepusher - chunks (from music is rotted one note)

5. this quote

"The point of using live versions of the tracks is that they show stupid people that, though their own stubbornness prevents them from being able to engage with my music, they hear other people cheering in the background, and realise that although this music is obscure, it cannot be totally inaccessible because other people like it. Because it is obscure, but not totally inaccessible, this makes it cool. This makes stupid people buy it. One day their children will dust it off and play it, and realise that I am the supreme musical genius of my generation. This means I'll still be able to play gigs when I'm an old fart with no ideas. Hopefully."

squarepusher - tetra-sync (from ultravisitor)

and now i wish i'd found room for journey to reedham and theme from ernest borgnine.

buy them

you know when lazy music journalists don’t bother actually researching a band they’ve been told to review and instead just describe them in terms of other bands instead of actually describing the music or providing any interesting information about the musicians? yeah the nme used to do that all the time (and they probably still do - who the fuck knows except for tweeny fans of the klaxons nowadays?) and it pissed me off.

anyway here’s a track from this new band who I don’t know much about but if you imagine mark e. smith fronting mouse on mars ripping off the first track from the latest lcd soundsystem record you’ll get the right idea.

oh wait…

von südenfed - fledermaus can't get it (from tromatic reflexxions)

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there’s a phenomena that seems to be sweeping poverty-striken small-town uk, hundreds and hundreds of little chav children are turning their backs on their burberry-clad elders and dying their hair black and wearing second-hand slipknot and korn tops which make them resemble goths circa 2000.

i’m sure it’s just a phase for many of them and by the time they’re fourteen they’ll be getting twelve-year-olds pregnant and defecating in bus shelters just like their older brothers. despite this, though, i do think that while it lasts it’s quite heartening, but it is a shame that they’re choosing to rebel against the happy hardcore and smooth fm r&b of traditional chavs with such awful tastes in music, though, because they’d probably quite like shouty loud hipster music like the new parts & labor record which would similarly almost certainly be beloved of all angsty thirteen year old funeral for a friend fans everywhere if only it wasn’t the preserve of pretentious beardy fucks in deerhoof t-shirts.

FREE THE MUSIC’S WHAT I SAY! so I hereby demand that if you have a little brother wearing an oversized mcr hoodie and black nail-varnish download the tracks below and force them to listen and in a few years they too may be a pretentious beardy fuck in a deerhoof t-shirt as opposed to an emo travesty or asbo teen.

parts & labor - new buildings (from stay afraid)

parts & labor - fractured skies (from mapmaker)

buy it