Hi!!
Here is New Exclusive Release information from Jazzy Sport Distribution

Incl. DJ Mitsu the Beats Remix !!
The 6th release from Japanese label is the 1st EP
of New Zealand ’s new comer Julien Dyne!!
This EP also feat Jazzy Sport’s top creator DJ Mitsu the Beats!!

From this title, start Pressing at Germany!
And would be good for you to deal with ..

Don’t miss this!!and give us any questions and requests.

All the best
Regards

Jazzy Sport Distribution

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Julien works as a co producer for Opensouls ,Tyra The Tornadoes ,and
Played with Mizell Bros,Om’mas (Sa-Ra),Steve Spacek,Harmonic 313 as a
drummer.
With mellow rhodes chords el-p playing,this track reminds the world like Spacek’s
way of Soul-Music.

Mitsu takes the original’s mellow way into heart worm soul , with
adding Piano sample and smooth and groovy beats.

on the flip.with male vocal Mara TK, 「Layer」 goes take Afro-
Jazzy Vybe mid soul dancer.「Deaky!　」is the instrumental
Hip Hop Track like a mixture of Sa-Ra and Luke Vibert !?

This is quite limited pressing!!
Don’t miss this!!

NZ rapper-cum-artist extraordinaire BF Buchanan aka Erik Ultimate sent over these amazing photos from his recent show in Dunedin.
If I was rich and had a gazebo, I would hire Erik Ultimate to create a work around the walls, like Monet’s waterlilies seen through the semi-closed eyes of a sleeping digital turtle.
That would be one hell of a gazebo.

The Sleeping installation, hosted by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, was a one week studio session completed upon return from rapping in NYC with Coco Solid.

BB sure does get around. When I caught up with him he had just spent “a few nights at this house in Karaka Bay, round Seatoun, where Peter Jackson lives. The house we stayed in was where the lady who wrote the screenplay for LOTR wrote it. It was kinda awesome…polar blasts of hail rolling into the harbour, and I made up a song channelling the power of Enya that goes: “Thhiiis is where I wrote the looord of da rings… such inspirational suuurroundings.”

What are your two favourite uses for linoleum or linoleum-cutters?
What’s a linoleum cutter? I use a ruler and a scalpel, that’s it. Having a bunch of coloured adhesive vinyl around is always handy for packaging mail, or on special occasions I will replace the add for cancer on my tobacco with a nice block of salmon pink which goes nicely with Park Drive mild yello.

It’s also good for posters and album/CD art work. Today I’m making a poster for a night I do at the Watusi called “The Black Out Compulsion Lounge”. My brother RAP AUTHORITAR is gonna do a performance there this Friday.
My sister Ruth originally hosted a party in NYC called “The Black Out Compulsion Aperitif”. So we are in the lounge now.

What’s your best memory of smalltown NZ?
Woah, small town NZ is sweet but also fucked. My childhood was in New Plymouth which is a beautiful place to grow up: the mountain, Back Beach, Pukekura park were all great adventures.
Masterton was edgier, discovering skateboards, punk rock, drugs and trouble… I sang in a band when I was 14 called NEGUS DELLUGE, we would go to Wellington to do shows with awesome bands like MICROWAVE BABIES and COMPOS MENTIS and get chased around by fully grown insanely destructive skinheads for wearing crass patches. Geez, supa exciting though. Doing radio in Hamilton was fun.

How do you design your artworks, and is technology your friend or foe?
The artworks have a starting point and then just continue. The composition can be an accident but sometimes I think about it; technology could definitely be more of a friend but I’m in no rush. I work in a pretty archaic way. im more interested in my relationship with a piece of paper than with a screen.

How much time do you spend on a computer per day (on average)
Aside from pause and play on my iTunes and hour after hour of whatever TV series I’m watching, probably about half an hour.

What’s your favourite next-level gadget or gizmo?
My laptop: it’s my first computer ever and I’ve had it for like six months. I think I’m using about 2% of its brain, but I love it!
My phone is real bad… it is a worse speller than me, which sux! I’m not against new stuff but you know, all of a sudden everyone has white plugs in their ears….or whatever it is….. it can be gross.

What does the future look like according to BF Buchanan?
I think developing gills would be the best thing.

You are quite a dab hand in the kitchen. What do you prefer to cook: risottos, rich reductions and masculine proteins, or deconstructed frozen sushi?

Hmmm…would have to go with rich reductions and masculine proteins. Definitely slow cook comfort stuff. I spent a year working in kitchens in Dublin and was kinda looking for the Irish cuisine. Aside from gaining a fondness for skate wings and Guiness, the best thing I found was at the chippers: chicken curry and chips, which is like deep fried chicken with chips and this awesome gravy with lots of curry powder in it. Sooo good… So my fave thing to make at home is to joint a chicken, marinate it in special crispy chicken coating from the Asian grocer [you gotta leave it in the flour stuff for a couple of hours]…then fry it with as much oil and butter as will fit in my or your pan [hey this is kind of a recipe], then roast with plenty of spuds… Whilst this is goin’ [you wanna put the spuds on first]… Fry onions, garlic and mushrooms in butter. Add gravy powder from the dairy (get 2 packets, it’s like 80 cents) and curry powder and dried chili, then boiling water, and stir etc. God damn, then yummo. So good….

What music genre best describes your culinary style?
Maybe Venga Boys doing a Van Morrison track.

Is your rumoured solo album still in the pipes?
Oh yeah, in the pipelines for sure. My lil bro has been writing heaps of cool stuff, so I’m like damnn, I should do something soon.
Tim Checkley AKA the mighty JIZMATRON is on board , should be good….

Catch Erik Ultimate’s Blackout Compulsion Lounge tomorrow night at The Watusi in Wellington, New Zealand!

On Sunday we dropped by the Kuchenplatte (cake platters) record fair, where various Cologne distribution company employees have the chance once a year to set up shop with a few crates of old records (balancing them on Bionade soda crates) and always end up making a killing. The above classy photo is of Groove Attack record store worker Dak aka DJ Memyselfandi (Side note: Carmen told me when she saw his DJ name for the first time, she thought it was an Ethiopian word)

Provocatively, there’s no actual cake – just one friendly old lady selling waffles to the crowds clutching 12″s of Biggie and Jobim.

Fittingly, considering how many of their staff were there beating eBay at its game, we found this original Groove Attack comp from years ago, which features the classic cosmic jam High Priestess by our friend Lars Vegas (half of Karma).

A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of visiting Murcia, Spain with the mini girl-gang of Mari.cha (Higher Love, Thessaloniki), Pippi Langstrumpff (Milan/Rotterdam) and Sassy J (Patchwork, Bern). So maybe it’s about time I posted a few photos and a brief recap.

Murcia is about a 40 min drive from Alicante and about 4 hours drive from Madrid…. it’s arid, surrounded by crumpled dry hills with lots of brand new apartment complexes mushrooming up, in interesting combinations of brick and rust-coloured aluminium. Perhaps little wonder that the festival isn’t big on the international clubber’s calendar – though it’s a blessing that you can wander around the Plaza las Flores in the old centre of the city, and not be bothered by any rust-coloured English tourists.

After we arrived on the Friday, a day spent nibbling on peanuts in airports was completed with a fortifying meal of potato crisps, blanched almonds and strips of cured ham. With whole baby pigs being hacked up mercilessly under our noses, this was no country for italo-disco vegetarian trainspotters.

Over at the festival, I blocked out the ambient noise of one rogue Italian cokehead, who Pippi valiantly tried to restrain, and started the set with slower BPMs like Dam Funk’s Let’s Take Off EP (Groove Attack promo), and the cherished Chuck Mangione record that Vladimir and Tako gave me for that one benighted birthday. The most fun I’ve had since Playground Love at c/o Pop festival last year. Other stuff I played: Pascal Schäfer track, Robin Hannibal’s Non+ album and Musiccargo’s new album. Pippi played after me, a painful two hour set in which she needed to go peepee because of the bubbling fountains spurting in front of the stage. Who said DJing was easy?

The next day after kicking it in town all afternoon (28 degrees) drinking ‘clara’ shandies, Sassy J surmounted technical problems with hip hop jams, and hazy deep house as the early evening sun threatened to burn holes in her records. We snuck off to see Matthew Herbert’s Big Band in the auditorium – not compelling enough to listen to off CD but enchanting live, with school teacherish orchestra members ripping up magazines and Eska teetering around in amazing mask-like glittering black make up and platform heels.

Then Mari.cha stepped to the stage and killed it as usual with Larry Levan classics like Celestial Choir – Stand On the Word, and modern bombs like Theo Parrish and Marcellus Pittman – Night of the Sagitarius. Too much fun!

After Mari.cha finished we mooched off to eat pizza, as some rabid techno-rock DJ called Speedballs took to the decks. We were going to stay up til 4am to watch Matthew Herbert DJ but instead hightailed away from all the aggressive hand-clappers back to the hotel, which had been commandeered by Catholic communion groups and was full of little terrorists in fluffy pink and white dresses.

I never bumped into Ladyhawke though we did share the dinner queue in the artist’s backstage area with the pooped-looking trombonists from Herbert’s Big Band. I watched about three Babyshambles songs on the back of a monitor that could be seen from backstage and behind a carpark, as Prodigy’s white trash entourage swept past self-importantly (including two 16 year old blonde girls and their mum).
But who needs celebs when you have a classy gurl crew in matching leopard tights.

Wow, kids – it’s been a while.

Last weekend I went to the Who Made Who gig at Gebäude9 in Cologne – I thought their live show might be more compelling than the albums, ’cause they are sort of bassy/synthy and they wear funny hats.

It was still close to zero degrees outside, despite the ghosts of daffodils floating past us in the dark, but as we walked from the subway stop I regretted my optimistic decision to wear heels with no socks.

Inside, the bar area was full of Intro Mag readers flouting Cologne’s empty gesture at a smoking ban. Gebäude 9 itself is a cool venue, huge hall, good lights and sound, bleachers at the back to stand on for a better view. I wasn’t too thrilled with the show – even though their anthem for girls who are “just over thirty” was sort of amusing, especially as I stood there in ill-advised heels feeling a bit bored and far from wild.

The show reached a simultaneous high & low point when they did a cover of Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction (wayyy too lowbrow for mois) but then brought out a young sousaphone player to honk along with the bassline (surreal & amusing, my fave). Tellingly, it was the sousaphone player who got the most applause at the end.

The thing with Who Made Who, I feel, is that the songs never resolve….I’m all for meandering jams but their songs seem to demand some kind of glittery hook that never comes, and end up feeling a bland imitation of…who? Only they know. I will give them a couple of bonus points for their Danish accents.

In a better manifestation of bass and synthiness, over the last week or two I’ve been listening to this promo of the new Idjut Boys mix on BBE, Night Dubbin’: a collection of dub versions of tracks by acts like D Train, Lenny White and Raw Silk. There’s something about those slapping ’80s dance basslines, that just hits it out of the ballpark.
Tha Best music for listening to in the shower.

Back when iPods only came in one non-colour – that very 90s shade of white – I decided that a single Apple device (my computer) was enough. I bought my first mp3-player from Bic Camera in Shibuya, Tokyo (pictured above), from a display in between ionic hairdryers, discount liquor and clocks. It was not Apple, and it was butt-ugly. The size of a shuffle, with an FM tuner included, it was nevertheless good for banging Seawind while jogging through the backstreets of Okusawa. If an earthquake struck Tokyo I figured the FM tuner would come in useful. Adding and deleting music files was achieved by scrolling through the music folder on my hard drive and dropping files into an easy-to-use syncing software. Still, it was annoying to have to mess around, converting m4a files from iTunes to play on it.

Apple announced yesterday at the Macworld Conference and Expo 2009 in San Francisco that music files purchased through iTunes would no longer be restricted by access control technologies – a method of controlling access to, conversion and copying of files known as digital rights management or DRM.

Despite the fact that digital purchases reached a milestone of 1 billion songs bought online in 2008 , according to an article yesterday in the New York Times, “industry pundits have long pointed to DRM as one culprit for music companies’ woes, saying it alienated some customers while doing little to slow piracy on file-sharing networks.“

Three major music labels – Sony, Warner and Universal – were in fact the ones dictating the DRM format to iTunes. Industry analysts have surmised that, due to worries about Apple’s increasing industry clout and dominant market share in digital music sales, the majors decided to offer unprotected music instead to other online vendors like Amazon’s mp3 store to help them become more competitive.

Did the annoyance factor of using a different brand mp3-player with an Apple computer encourage me to purchase music from different online retailers like Amazon.com? No. But it did, eventually, lead me to cave in and start using a (hand-me-down, 90s-shade-of-white) iPod. Things were just easier that way. I guess re-induction into the church of Apple was not exactly what the major labels had in mind.

Steve Jobs, in his letter Thoughts on Music (published in early 2007) denied that the small percentage of purchased iTunes music (3%) compared to illegal downloads owned by the average consumer would provoke someone to use an iPod rather than a player from a competitor. Whether that’s true or not, the deal with the majors to remove DRM from iTunes and in turn to allow variable pricing via iTunes shows a certain mellowing in Apple’s approach.

Still, it doesn’t look like the syncing of Apple devices will become any more flexible. Currently iPod owners can only sync their players to one computer. Every iPod is supposed to be unique to one computer, so that even with the more easily transferrable iTunes purchases, an iPod cannot be used as a portable hard drive to connect with any computer. Erik puts it this way: “If you have two computers you can only use one to sync an iPod or iPhone with iTunes. If I want to put something I did on the studio computer onto my iPhone, I have to first put the files on the other computer with an external drive: I can’t just plug the iPhone straight into the studio computer.”

Meanwhile, supporters of other mp3-players have had to endure their own trials.
On December 31st, Zune and Toshiba Gigabeats mp3-players suffered a ‘Y2K9’-like crash.

How can we get all these mp3-player frustrations out of our hair? Guess we’ll have to go plug in that ionic hairdryer.

Media watch Pt 1

Was listening to an archived
interview by the irrepressible Kim Hill with journalist Michael Wolff on National Radio, as I made mexican meatballs the other night.

Any of Kim Hill’s podcasts are worth checking out: she is an institution in New Zealand radio. At times dry and confrontational, yet quick to make sly jokes and be chatty: your grandmother would think she was a hoot. This interview isn’t notable so much for Wolff’s character defences for media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, so much as for the comments about what makes a good sellable paper and the future of newspapers in general.
According to Wolff, there isn’t one.
He’s hardly the first person to pronounce doomsday, withmany newspapers closing or cutting staff numbers in the USA in 2008, and others outsourcing journalistic work on top of technical labour to India. But it’s always sobering to hear such a hopeless prognosis.

Of course, there’s no doubt, it’s much more time-economic to click through one’s favourite sections online, especially when there are slide shows of hypo allergic architecture in towns called Snowflake to look at. (Did I really say time-economic?)

Whether they maintain an online presence or not, I suspect the demise of print editions of newspapers like the New York Times will end a golden age of writers who were rewarded, however meagerly, for penning standfirsts like the following:

“Living with the clones of a dead dog has its surprises. The DNA may be the same but the behavior is another story.”

Media Watch Pt. 2

I’ve ranted incoherently about American Vogue before. But on December 31, 2008, Cathy Horyn did us all a favour by expressing the shortcomings and strong points of Vogue more delicately, in this article in the NY Times.

(Images by Scott King as posted on www.creativereview.co.uk. King is an artist-slash-graphic designer who has recently exhibited at Ps1 in NYC and the Kunstverein in Munich)

I’m not advocating that you illegally download the Motown Christmas album from this blog of Christmas albums. Actually I’m not sure if I recommend the album at all.

And I really hope I never have to hear Bangbros – Last Christmas (Wannabe Pulsedriver Remix).

The only worthwhile album on that blog, oddly enough, is A Charlie Brown Christmas from the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

We have it on vinyl. I’m serious.

Last week me & Wulf went to see the Goldenen Zitronen play at the Kultur Bunker in Mülheim, where unfortunately it was too dark to take photos with my phone-cam. But one floor down they had an exhibition of anarchist and protest posters, so I’m posting pics of those instead.

The poster below is protesting against a population census.

The Goldenen Zitronen were dope by the way. They’re a punk band from Hamburg – their best songs are sparely composed with lyrics about how it’s easier to enter Europe as a sneaker than as a person (Ectomorph thought the sneaker song sounded like an updated DAF). On their merch table they had a poster saying ‘Schwabinggrad Ballet’. (Schwabing is a la-di-da upperclass area in Munich)

After the show me & Wulf got lahmacun with parsley, radish and pickled chillies from the Turkish street in Mülheim. Über-geil!

Excerpt of lyrics: Die Goldenen Zitronen – Mila.

What I don’t really do often, is to get lost.
I always try to travel paths that are known to me.
At least, in the countryside it was like that.
What’s it called again, that crap shop?
It can’t be possible, that they didn’t pick me up. Shit.
Everybody’s wearing these plaid Burberry sweaters that you can get from H&M. Shit shop.
You can memorise the number for the directory service yourself, you wankers.
I’m really terrified of situations where I’m assessed.
Jens said he only has 13 summers left.
Next stop: the train stops.
Don’t throw any German shepherds out the window.
Again, there’s nothing in the air.
Apart from fear.
This is true: somebody I know named his book “I Can’t Take it Anymore”.
I am Papi the dummest crocodile.
I believe I was in the same street last week, with the same questions.
I don’t dare to call any of you guys.
A topped-up prepaid card doesn’t entail an invited circle of friends.
The lights are blinding my eyes. A spark singed my knee.
Mila. Mila. You psycho. Please.
C’mon, you know what to do when you’re wobbling. No? Mila!
You’re the queen of the stone age.
I’m an idiot in pantaloons.
Tomorrow I’m going to the best Media Market store of all time.
Because that’s what they said. On TV.
Men would destroy telephone booths, but they seem to be blind in their magenta eyes.