So close!

Yet so far.

Happy monkey.

And yet:

Melbourne Zoo
Melbourne CBD
Spencer Street before they built the new roof
No Fed Square though
Jeff's Shed truely is massive
Parliament House, Canberra
No good Sydney stuff yet either

And my house ain't there yet.

I swore I wouldn't get one until you could get 1Gb for Aus$50 but I gave in. Maybe I should have bought cheaper from EBay. Maybe I could have waited a year for my dream to come true, but the idea of claiming it on tax won over.

512Mb USB Key, Aus$80.

Yay for me. No more floppy discs.

Dave Lombardo of Slayer / Fantomas is a fantastic drummer, and that certainly shines on DJ Spooky's newy.

Unfortunately it seems DJ Spooky is a crap producer. Many of the songs are OK in themselves but seem half finished and disconnected. It feels very much like all of the instrumentalists played their parts in different parts of the world and Spooky stuck everything together, which is quite likely what happened.

Too many times I'd hear the instruments (mostly Dave's drums) do something interesting with the beat, and the rest of the instruments would ignore it and continue on, loop style. No connection between the musical parts at all.

Thankfully most of the tracks are instrumental. I can't say I'm that much of a fan of Chuck D's effort on the Public Enemy "hard rock" remakes on this album, although again I mostly blame the production. The vocals seem too loud, the production on the music is distant, like listening to a recording of a garage jam.

In fact the production is very minimal, and maybe it's deliberate. The guitars are rarely (never?) doubled. The guitar is always too quiet. The drum sound is consistant, loud and clear (Dave fans will LOVE this). Vocals are dead in the middle, with the bass. DJ Spooky's excellent scratching work seems lost.

I suspect this recording will grow on me. It's interesting to listen to a record that, on the surface, sounds like a DJ jamming in-studio with a metal band, right down the "run out of ideas" crazy breakdowns at the ends of songs. And as another more positive reviewer said, it is refreshing to hear a Metal+HipHop album that is nothing at all like Korn.

I don't hate it, I haven't given it a fair listen. I know I don't like it because it isn't what I hoped it would be. I keep waiting for that golden moment when all the parts link perfectly together but it never happens. Maybe I'll listen again with less biased ears and will enjoy it more.

Maybe it's one for the car, up really loud.

I bought a couple of albums recently purely on instinct and reputation, something I haven't done for a long while...

Dälek's latest, Absence, on Mike Patton's Ipecac label was disappointing. My review after a couple of listens is thus...

Straight up hip-hop drums + monolog vocals. Some single-note keys, some double-bass loops.

Accompanied by tortured banshees, ghosts and corpses playing guitar feedback loops.

I might like it if it wasn't for the banshees.

A few more listens has my musically tuned mind sifting out the banchees and digging for interesting musical content but it isn't really there. It's a pity really.

Prefix mag said it best with their recent review. I couldn't say any more. They certainly recommend ignoring this album and picking up Dalek's previous 2002 effort, From the Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots although I may have already been burnt too deep.

The industrial landscapes of the Newark, New Jersey-based trio's breakthrough, 2002's From the Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots, remain, but little else has survived the transition to the accurately named Absence. Those sitars and jazz-piano samples bleeding into static and guitars-gone-wild haven't been replaced with anything, and what's left is producer Octopus's stark wasteland of mostly unvaried feedback, with little to break up the monotony.

David Rowan writes for The Times on the UK's requests to extend copyright terms:

Once creative works are in the public domain, people frequently make wonderful new things with them — a process denied by the encroachment of corporate interests through copyright extensions. Would West Side Story have been made if Shakespeare’s heirs could protect Romeo and Juliet? Would Frank Capra ’s It’s A Wonderful Life have been reinvented as a Christmas TV classic had it not slipped out of copyright in 1975 and been rediscovered by a new generation who could buy it cheaply on VHS?

and...

There are also the interests of lesser-known artists to consider. A blanket copyright extension would encourage record companies to restrict access to their entire back catalogues, even works (the vast majority) that they would never exploit.

His comments on similar requests to extend copyright terms in 1841 are quite telling:

Thomas Babington Macaulay understood the perils when a similar battle to extend copyright was being waged in 1841.

[...]

Many valuable works, he argued, would be suppressed — and publishers treated with such contempt that the reading public would happily turn to "piratical booksellers".

Read my previous rant on the topic.