WOEBOT

Random Guff.

1. Splutters.

Notice the little safety pin! Unbelievable! The most Golf Punk I've ever got is getting drunk in the bunker on the ninth hole at school.

2. Vincent Gallo Live!

First rate seat as you can gauge by the intimate view of proceedings I got.

Ambling in with colleague French Vinyl Deity Sacha Dieu I spotted his friend Andy Weatherall hiding out in the stalls. Sacha wandered over with me in tow and proceeded to chat to Weatherall for upwards of fifteen minutes without introducing me! Me sitting rather uncomfortably on an arm-rest, trying to look blase, seething. I don't care who he is (ultimately), when I'm in company I like to be introduced. Rude innit! Shame on you Dieu you slipshod import you! I've never been a fan of Weatherall's incidentally. Perhaps in direct consequence I spent the first hour of Gallo's set trying to stop myself from barracking him with oaths. They would have sailed with such force across the pious atmosphere of the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

What is it about Gallo that inspires this weird mixture of devotion and irritation? In the end I just kept quiet, largely out of consideration for the man who seemed to be dieing slowly on stage, apologising to Alt_Rock poster boy Jim O'Rourke for his totally out-of-tune singing and to the crowd for his jittery nerves. Vincent is essentially a righteous dude, as one might infer from this his rather spectacularily positive eBay profile. Hey, I'm a fan!

Gallo usually works on his own, tending the fragile scapes of his recordings like Derek Jarman's his garden amid the desolate shingle beneath Dungeness Power Station. It's all about context isn't it? When you supplant the elegant weed growth it can end up wilting in transit. In spite of this it was cool to hear the mildewed tones of his Mellotron and relish in the dank spacious underplaying of "Honey Bunny" and "Laura." Occassionally Vince was so off he was ON!

One thing which grated on me however was the idiotic celebrity star-turns of Polly Harvey (Who the hell is this useless woman? Why has she not disappeared yet?) and John Frusciante (I've more sympathy for this RHCP guitarist, he's about the only semi-good thing about the band, quite a startling intense history he has...). Why doesn't Gallo realise these people are pygmies, and yet the crowd go bananas as the "supergroop" perform an extremely rote cover of "Blue Moon". You sad people! Next time Vincent get an interesting guest, like er I dunno, Casino-vs-Japan or The Books. Even Weatherall might have been useful on tambourine, though hang-on, he filed out rather noticeably mid-show.

3. Mystery Record.

I'm a diehard fan of the French Label BYG/Actuel and came across this LP a few weeks ago. I was *so very close* to buying it on spec, but at the last minute decided against it. I wonder if anyone knows anything about this rather cool looking French Rock group signed to the label. I remember that Gong and another rock group also released recordings on BYG.

4. Quelling Revolt.
"Yeah but back to Kanye and pushing sampling to limits ... it's noticeable how when people get to raving about his tracks, how it often turns into a list of the things he sampled ? "i love that Luther bit, it's so gorgeous"... it just makes me wonder, yunno?"

Thought I'd better address this humorous elbowing (ouch!) I just got from Reynolds, who incidentally has loads of excellent new stuff up.

1) Firstly. Pray oh master, what exactly are you driving at? All this gentle "wondering" appears to be in search of a punch-line, perhaps one along the lines of: "Write a proper sentence you imbeciles!" Lol.

2) Why do people (and I'm guessing here that you're including yourself amid the spotters, such is your largesse!) list Kanye West's samples? Surely this isn't such a Yeti? It has to do with with the foregrounding process which the speeding-up of said samples creates. Samples in Hip-Hop tend to be mulched, made transparent, obscured for the means of disguising their provenance, made brief so as avoid heavy taxation by their originators. Kanye wants his samples to stand-out, he wants to milk them for all their period wonder. No surprise then that people comment on them. West's modus operandi seems to mimic that of the original Ardkore producers, who sought with samples to create weird juxtapositions and bizarre new contexts. In fact you'll notice the same sample-highlighting when people talk about them in Ardkore: "Oooh I just love it in Trip II the Moon when those John Barry/James Bond strings come in."

3) Why did I (rather gratingly) list ALL the sample in the Kanye West LP. I thought it was funny in a kind of obsessive/goonish way, and I was served rather well by the record sleeve insert which had them all listed. Bah!* I spent ages getting them correct!

5. It's a Family Affair.
Lulu my daughter has just learnt how to put features on the people she's drawing, not somewhere two inches from their face. Last night Catherine was sitting with her while she was drawing and remarked: "Oooh Daddy's got a nice smile!" To which Lulu (only two) replied: "He's been record shopping." They (and Granny) all thought this was hilarious, which I guess it is, but I was a little sad.

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*Bah! is a Trademark of the estate of K-Punk and is used here pending permission.

Posted by Woebot at April 13, 2004 08:09 AM