Jul 28th, 2007
Popped along to the ever so tiny basement of the 13th Note last Saturday for a very low key gig by Brisbane bred, Melbourne based singer/songwriter Darren Hanlon. The organisers (Drive Carefully Records – a local start-up label) mistook me for him twice (must be a distinctive Aussie look I have going), leading to some [...]
Jul 26th, 2007
Our penultimate day at Dour dawned hotter and grimier, and dragged us complaining out of our tents at an early hour. After depositing Dave in the local town for an epic (and no doubt smelly) trip to Milan, we chanced upon a shady patch of grass and proceeded to stay there for the next 6 [...]
Jul 22nd, 2007
In line with the best methods of the internet I’m just going to cut and paste from Seb’s latest group email for our day three description (extensive post length, illicit drug use and deity references warning!);
“A hot Saturday was mainly spent eating, playing 500 (you can’t stop Dave when he gets the cards in his [...]
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With a downpour overnight – Dour approached real music festival territory rapidly (mud, general filth, mud, crazy people on any number of substances, mud). Luckily the rain held off for the rest of the festival [...]
Jul 20th, 2007
Part 4 day music extravaganza, part high school catch up, three quarters giant trash mound; Dour festival offered much in southern Belgium last weekend. As it was quite epic in scale I’ll break it down into days to try to avoid curing everyone’s insomnia.
After a fairly straightforward trip there (taxi, train, plane, bus, train, train, [...]
Jul 11th, 2007
With word on the street that summer might finally arrive in Scotland we instead escaped to Stockholm for grey and drizzle over Scandinavia. It was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to catch up with some of the unwashed masses of Australians that seem to be floating about the continent this summer, but although we didn’t [...]
Jul 9th, 2007
Local contemporary classical group Paragon Ensemble staged a small history lesson last week, on local 100 year dead luminary Lord Kelvin. Amid an interesting electro/classical score, interpretations of Kelvin life were portrayed with a moving simplicity by a group of individuals with  Down’s Syndrome.
Apart from a show tune with dancing Kelvinator fridges perhaps stretching [...]
Jul 1st, 2007
On the recommendation (…a kind of Velvet Underground meets Metallica without as many vocals) of one of my my musical docents: Seb, we soundchecked Japanese 3-piece Boris on Tuesday night. A noise band whose output spans at least 8 genres according to Wikipedia (although it is the first time I have heard of sludge [...]