The Opinionated Diner

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.

I really don’t – but I guess it will come across a little that way.

I don’t win things. I know that everybody says exactly that but I really don’t. Okay, I won $754 the first time I played Lotto. What a killer game thought I – and I spent several thousand dollars over the next few years trying to do it again before I stopped, and made what I thought would be a difficult-to-comply-with resolution to thereafter avoid the weekly what-if flutter.

It wasn’t and I don’t. Mostly.

Nobody I know really wins Lotto. People in rural towns win it. Not urban wastrels like myself – people who’d be as likely to blow it in a year or two on irrational artistic black-holes, or funding hopelessly wonderful but always marginal records, as I’ve tended to do in years past when I have a sudden wad of cash. Other people buy houses, I give the money to recording studios in what must be the most fiscally foolhardy action possible in a nation of where a gold record is unlikely to cover the cost of the giveaway T-shirts let alone anything more substantial.

Then my uncle won first prize in Lotto, but sadly only as a part of large consortium. This, it occurred quickly to me, meant he had expended his – and you may argue the whole family’s – random-chanceness on about enough to make an only just measurable dent in his annual – not excessive – outgoings.

This week however both Brigid and I won. My wife makes me feel like a winner everyday, but what I’m trying to say is that is, we both won a prize.

And from the same magazine -  Bangkok 101, easily the best visitor aimed magazine in this town – and, really more importantly, only one of two that doesn’t seem to crawl around Patpong or Soi Cowboy’s gutters, cater to overweight Irish pub dwellers, or, and I don’t know which is worse, project some sort of post Raj expat lifestyle complete with Polo Ponies, privilege, and columns complaining about everything in, and explaining how ‘they’ should fix large parts of, this supposedly not-like-home pisspot of a city/country. Fuck off. Really.

BKK 101 has, unusually, perhaps uniquely, for English language magazines in SEA, humour, depth and style, and deserves the plug (if you are coming this way…) I’m giving it here.

So yes, two prizes. Quite different.

The first was a riverboat cruise. A moonlit dinner – which they awkwardly pitch as romantic – and boogie set against a moving backdrop of the famed sights on the Chao Phraya River, on one of those monstrous neon and gaud adorned floating restaurant barges that trek up and down the river that defined and still defines this city, every night after dark. A kind of poor-mans inland loveboat.

And of course, normally wild horses…

However, we decided to walk the plank on the Pearl of Siam if only to take the piss, and duly booked, making a mental note not to eat too much of what would doubtlessly be horrendous, reheated, spiceless and Farang-friendly (marginally) Thai food, and thus avoid any chance of food poisoning wrecking the second won prize, a dinner for two at the minimal-fab and normally silly expensive Bed Supperclub.

After a drink at one of the city’s great secrets, Balco, that elusive and almost unique thing: a well priced bar with an an impressive view of said river, we joined the queue of flip flop and tourist market t-shirt wearing Australians, Southern Europeans, Koreans, Chinese and Japanese, and staggered on, wondering repeatedly if perhaps we should’ve stayed in the rooftop bar long enough to miss the gangway being raised.

But we didn’t and here we were, I imagine because we were on a freebie, being gracelessly ushered into the bowels of the big boat, where the windows were only marginally above the water-line, to our table – naturally number 13.

I looked anxiously for life jackets and exits. Having happily noted both I sipped my luminous-pink jelly-like welcome drink. It tasted like the syrup found in those cans of fake cherries which Brigid, who knows these things much more-so than I do, are really olives dyed pink, mixed with some FDA approved solidifying agent and extra sucrose to kill (or create perhaps) the flavour.

The Japanese and Korean tour parties we were sharing our semi-submerged deck with seemed quite impressed as did the smiling evangelical couple from Idaho across the way, in their matching his and hers tan safari outfits.

Brigid thought briefly about a cocktail until I mentioned the local spirits that sell for 150B per litre in the 7/11, and we both settled instead on a Singha.

The boat was still docked when we were invited to eat. We wandered cautiously to the front of the deck, where a throng of our fellow deckdwellers were semi-silently pushing and shoving each other to maximise their own suzerainty over the large platters of salmon sushi and prawns. To my eye there seemed to be enough for all, but the party of elderly Koreans at the front were taking neither chances nor any bullshit from an equally aged grouping of Japanese.

Perhaps the rift ran deeper than the fish.

As I waited for a moment of calm, this caught my eye:

Technology, huh?

I moved on.

The larb-gai – or a rough approximation of it – actually looked ok, so I added some to the side of my plate and then went to the prawn cakes (with plum sauce it said – I could see none at all). I made a point of ensuring that everything I took looked very well cooked – I sidestepped the fishy looking salad – and I sat down and nervously put a small piece of the chicken in my mouth.

It was good. Really quite good.

Brigid pointed to the prawn cakes and nodded. They were even better.

Gosh.

Feeling a little more assured – and hungry – we returned to the buffet and added curries and more. I returned twice and then found the fabulous green sweet sticky rice(-ish) stuff. I was drawn back to that platter twice more.

Then, it’s Thailand  – the food is always at least serviceably good, right? Well not always around Silom, Khao San or Lower Sukhumvit, but this was better than that. It even had above tourist levels of spice in a city where most Western visitors usually order that dish called Pad Thai – with no spice – and think they’ve had Thai food.

Meanwhile we were on our way. We’d left the River City dock without me noticing but I did notice that the mid-western evangelists had managed to score a couple more pink welcome drinks and were getting noticeably louder as the sugar hit. The world over, American tourists, especially those from the vast bits between San Francisco and New York, always involve the whole room in their conversations, whether  intimate in detail or not.

Please, nobody feed these two redbull.

The band, or at least I assumed it was a band – we only had a remote audio feed down in the bowels of the boat – lurched from a creeky take of Feelings to the perhaps a little inappropriate Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, during which the singer paused and said, in a broken mid-Pacific accent:

‘On the left is a temple’

And indeed there was: a very bright big one. Lovely.

‘On the right is a church – it is very old.’

Yep – the Japanese and Korean massive though, seemed more interested in the numerous TVs, which had odd footage of people levitating in India and flaming coffins being tossed into the sea in Taiwan.

We went upstairs.

There we found – on the roof deck – the folks who had obviously paid to be there, unlike us.

The slowly passing shore scene was rather glorious – this river, night and day, is quite something and the various temples, 19th century Portuguese churches and more, were lit and very photogenic. Then, day or night, they are always quite splendid. I forget just how much so until I see them again and am as similarly awed as I was the previous 200 times I’ve done so.

That said, the lighting at night adds another spectral dimension.

Some people took lots and lots of photos for Facebook, and rotated quickly back and forth with camcorders producing – you just know –  moving images that cause instant head twisting nausea as you try to follow the them on the single occasion they’ll ever be looked at by anyone.

Most people – about 80% – just looked bored, and gazed formlessly into the darkness or at the band. Australians do this a lot. I guess when you have Ayers Rock, The Sydney Opera House and that submarine in a playground half way down the Hume Highway – several hundred miles from the Ocean and in a town which also oddly calls itself the Jazz Capital Of The World – it takes a lot to impress.

In New Zealand we have a wonderful harbour but no man-made constructs at all to get exciting and breathless about, so we tend to be more easily awed by this sort of thing.

The band were perched in a tiny spot at the front of this deck, and were enthusiastically finishing their set with something they said was from the ‘fabulous Manhattan Transfer’. Perhaps it was in another life.

The crowd, however, were mostly grim faced and looked completely disinterested in their surroundings and stony.

At the front a middle aged ocker couple with a teen son – who probably wasn’t consciously trying to emulate Kathy Burke‘s Perry – were having a domestic tussle which had ended in a silent standoff. It was obvious that he – Perry’s dad – simply didn’t want to be there. A reasonable guess may be that he’d wanted to go to Patpong and she’d insisted on the boat.

Or perhaps he came home late from Patpong the night before with lipstick on his privates and had no idea – he said – how it had arrived there.

He tried to hug her. She pushed him away and he skulked off.

The PA farted a couple of times and then burst into life, and the original recording of the always appropriate redneck love song Achy Breaky Heart arrived loudly. Perry and his mum rose and began line dancing in front of us.

‘Tamworth’? Brigid mused.

More temples passed as – oblivious – they shook their butts and rotated in perfect tandem. They’d done this before.

The band returned and announced:

‘It’s time to rock’n'roll’

and banged instantly into All Shook Up. Nobody on the deck moved. The singer, who seemed to be on the last gig of a disappointing career, looked nervously at the crowd and then back at the band. They’d lost the moment. Elvis might satisfy the German tour groups but this lot were having none of it. Killing the musical faux pas without sentiment, she announced happily that the next tune was: Achy Breaky Heart.

Perry and mum were back up in a heartbeat.

As it finished the singer asked, ‘Who likes Lady Gaga?’

Perry and mum didn’t but were quickly replaced by a hot blooded young Latin couple  – doing some well practised moves they’d picked up from some old Enrique Iglesias video.

The rest of the deck seemed unmoved by any of it. They sat.

Next to us stood a happy power drinker. He was ordering and swiftly sculling Singhas in lots of two.

Drowning his package deal depression maybe – or just a pisshead….

As soon as we docked Brigid and I ran to get a cab. There were few – just the normal smattering of you’d-have-to-be-nuts tuk-tuks and the meter-is-broken tourist touts – so we went into the Sheraton, adjacent to the dock, to try and find a kosher one out the front.

I’ve never been to an Indian L’Oreal convention before.

I have now. Swarms of bejewelled Indian hairdressers and overly coiffured sales people with that unique South Asian take on the 60s Roy Orbison cut wandered past.

Then through it came a note perfect chorus of Please Please Me and we saw, in a mostly empty bar, the fab four – or at least a Thai replica of said band, knocking out Lennon-McCartney classics (and a George tune or two).

They took a break and I took a snapshot of John. He was cool. ‘We know all their songs’ he said. ‘Hang around – we do requests’.

We did.

We looked at the bar menu. 350B for a Stella. Fuck me. I decided to order a Ferderbrau, the German styled weissbier made with mixed results – but drinkable – by Singha. It was only 220B, which is only about 220% more than you’d pay for a pint in a non-hotel bar. It came. It was a 200 mil glass. One wonders how The Sheraton can justify a 1200% markup over wholesale. That said, I’ve travelled long enough not to ponder these things too much.

Who the hell drinks in hotel bars. We do I guess, and there was a smattering of other faux-Fab-4 fans ordering as well. One round probably pays the whole band.

The band struck up and asked for requests – the words Revolution Number 9 almost left my lips but instead they formed around Birthday, since it was Brigid’s.

Second verse, same as the first – except it’s not.

Just under twenty hours later we found ourselves walking into Bed Supperclub.

Bed is very famous. With some justification.

There is one in, I think, Florida and, newly, one in Paris I understand. I’d been several times before, the including once to see the former lead singer of Culture Club play a set of cheesy electro-ish house, which, given George’s history, had evoked an inevitable feeling of pathos. Time (Clock of the Heart) indeed.

I loved Culture Club and the way they slotted into both the pop charts and the alternative post punk scenes credibly and so effortlessly. It was sad to see where he’d ended up.

That said, the nightclub side is an amazing venue to see a DJ – the best sightlines on planet earth – from huge continuous wall sofas on a mezzanine – an incredible sound system and a large efficient bar. It works.

The Laurent Garnier gig was one of the best electronic shows I’ve ever seen. Mindblowing.

This, however, was the first time we had eaten in the other half, the all-white restaurant tube which looks like a set from some 60s spaghetti sci-fi movie or Woody Allen’s Sleepers.

As we were ushered to our ‘bed’, the pouting waiter, who looked vaguely ridiculous in his harem pants, as if he too had stolen something from an old set, this time an MC Hammer video complete with one of those ridiculous Kid’n'Play haircuts, said:

‘Tonight is Model night!’

Whoa – and as if on cue, a couple of towering, spindly legged, picture perfect, things sauntered gorgeously in and sat at the far end of the almost endless bed which doubled as a place to eat – albeit at a specially placed table – no bedding down with the hoi polloi for these gals.

‘And later – salsa dancing…’ Hammer continued, albeit with a board sneer obviously directed our way. We rapidly removed the meal voucher from his view.

I ordered a beer, a Paulaner. It was only twice the standard beyond-Bed rate, and we sat down with the menu. Predictably the DJ seemed to be limited, as policy I guess, to a selection of tracks taken from the odious Buddha Bar albums – awful, wispy collections that plague almost all the more ‘fabulous’ restaurants in South East Asia.

Sound sophistication comes in an incredibly overpriced box it seems.

A perfectly formed German couple ¹ in pristine white flowing resort wear, as you do in Asia I understand, arrived with who I assume, from looks, to be the woman’s elderly mother in tow. They said – very, very loudly so we could all hear – that they were thrilled to be back. We were supposed to be impressed. They were regulars.

Arriving with your bemused old mum may have trashed that.

Would you you bring your ancient relative – one who looks like she’d rather be in slippers with Coro Street (as I admit I would’ve been after a couple of hours) –  to a very twee and pretentious joint where one is expected to lounge fabulously on huge white beds and eat messy food balanced awkwardly between your lap and the unstable white thing they’ve designated as a table?

MC Hammer pursed his lips and told us firmly it was time to order. Now. Complying with the instruction and still a little in awe of his overstated and briefly fashionable – about 22 years ago – pants, a look completed this time by a pair of curled-toed Aladdin slippers, we both opted for the three course set menu and took, as our main, the recommended Waygu burger – medium rare.

Without uttering a word, Hammer strutted back to the kitchen.

The dishwasher came on. Really, really loudly. It blended badly – nay, drowned out – the ambience of the sub-Yoga beats of the Buddha Bar discs. The gaggle of models sat silently rigid a few metres aware – blank faced and utterly perfect. The waiter took them something that looked like limp lettuce.

Model food.

The food arrived. I have no idea what my starter was – it was that memorable. We ate it and forgot it the moment our plates were cleared.

The mains then appeared, about the same time as the first part of a floorshow began.

Three guys dressed as something – one was in a plastic bag – came out and the words projected on the screen behind informed us all that we were about to see an interpretation of an ancient Brahman legend. The guy in the plastic bag climbed out and handed it to one of the others. He then peered knowingly upwards, as the third picked up his pre-positioned acoustic guitar and began to forcefully strum with implied meaning.

What it implied I’m not sure.

Very slowly, stretching out each syllable so we could savour its meaning, he began to sing:

‘Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try…..’

My gag reflex was automatic. I tried to hide it but that simply meant the reflex mutated into a muted guffaw – and Brigid told me to behave.

He continued at a pace obviously designed to give us the personal mental space to reflect on the profundity:

‘No hell below us / above us only sky…’

I looked at the models – they were still stony faced but had shifted a little – I guessed they had found some meaning in the words, perhaps finding the link between the ancient Brahman legend and Lennon’s turgid third form verse.

I took a bite from the Waygu burger and gagged a second time. As the song faded and the three performers very, very slowly shuffled away, heads down – as the solemnity of their message demanded –  a lump formed in my throat.

It came from the solid congealed knob that was the medium rare Japanese-raised burger pattie, and it quickly became lodged in the back of my mouth and refused for a moment to move. Panicking, I eventually forced it down with more of the expensive German lager.

The thought that the very last thing I was ever going to hear was a tune written by a wildly rich junkie in a mansion in Surrey telling me to give away all my possessions – sung by a man who had just climbed out of a plastic bag, choked fatally by a burger served by a twat who looked like MC Hammer, crossed my mind briefly.

I looked at Brigid and she was having the same, possibly the worst high-end food in Bangkok, moment as I was and struggling to consume the flavourless play-dough textured lump.  And, worse, the pattie was an odd colour. What was it? Who knows? We gave up.

The Germans next to us seemed all good though. Happily, they’d found meaning in the show and were still clapping furiously. Across the way another European couple – English we thought – had set up a video camera on a stand and were capturing the whole evening. I wondered how the neighbours and family in Scunthorpe would deal with a two hour movie that included two New Zealanders in the background clasping at their throats and throwing down German lager in an attempt to gather another breath.

Or would it, as with almost every video shot on holiday anywhere, simply languish in a box for a few years, or on a hard drive, unwatched and forgotten until eventually dumped.

Forget was what I wanted to do with the rest of the meal. However, Hammer insisted we have the pudding. I opted for one of those chocolate thingys with the hot melted middle bit that just about everyone everywhere did in the mid ’00s. Brigid chose the sticky rice and mango. This is Thailand – even the soi dogs can knock up a passable rendition of the national dessert if pushed.

Really, we should have left when we could. The actors returned dressed as monkeys and then began to belch squawky noises to sub-Hendrix electric guitar riffs – very Thai. Not.

You really forget what people will do to entertain tourists.

And the pudding arrived. My dry brown furry lump had a slightly softer brown lump in the middle and Brigid’s was an impregnable block of seemingly long-coagulated white and orange, parts of which perhaps used to be rice in a former life.

MC Hammer tossed a customer comments questionnaire onto our table. We really couldn’t find words. ‘Unique’ was the only word we could find.

I looked – the models seemed to be enjoying the faux-Hendrix. They were hot for the impending salsa.

We left.

Briefly, we mentioned to each other that the food on the Riverboat, which we had dreaded, was in another league.

We worked hard to find words to best describe Bed and only came up with the obvious ones: twee, facile, insubstantial, overpriced, tacky and so on. Brigid perhaps caught it best when she said it felt like the sort of joint a hairdresser would open.

Then again, some of my best friends are hairdressers….

Would I go again? Bed, uh, no. At least not to eat – it was awful beyond awful on every level. The Loveboat, maybe not because I’ve done it now, but there are worst ways to spend $40 on fairly reasonable food, take in one of the world’s great rivers – quite gob-smacking at night – tempered by some voyeuristic humour.

And, hell, it was almost free. I am ungrateful.

New Zealand’s fiery sixties icon, Sandy Edmonds, on a just discovered OZ TV show clip from 1966, doing Bobby Hebb’s Sunny.

To check what she was really capable of, check this garage stormer.

At the top of her game, she disappeared without trace at the end of the sixties, and nobody seemed to know where or what she’d become. The early days of the internet even featured a ‘Where’s Sandy’ site. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that the mystery was largely solved: she was a designer in Melbourne, Rosalie Edmondson-Corner.

Graham Reid details the journey here.

——-

And they were vaguely contemporaries, but on the other side of the planet and a galaxy apart, however I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention Ziggy’s 65th year yesterday. There are dozens/hundreds of sites covering it and there is little more I can add, aside from humbly pointing out that the old bugger changed my world forever. And he changed yours even if you don’t know it.

My first serious date was to a school ball in 1973. My girlfriend at the time, the late and missed Jane Wilson, had an Aladdin Sane stripe on her face. When we formed punk bands, Bowie was the conduit that almost everything that initially inspired us – Iggy, Lou and the Dolls – was funnelled via.

This was a man who in 12 months created, co-created Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Raw Power and Transformer. He then took a brief breather before inventing post-Apocalyptic rock, for better or worse Plastic Soul, and offering up an inventive reworking of Krautrock with Eno that helped define the post-punk landscape probably more than any other artist, and thus the audio landscape we live in now.

Every single album he released or worked on between 1971 (we can forgive most of the two albums called simply David Bowie, from 1967 and 1969, although London Boys from the first is a fabulous pointer towards the future) and his last major work before a 90s rejuvenation, Scary Monsters, was a landmark that, as only The Beatles in rock history have also done, changed the way everything of interest was done thereafter.

So happy birthday, David.

65, fucking hell, do I feel really old…

A couple Three vids. The first is a simply wonderful live version of Paul Simon’s America, done in the aforesaid London Boys style, from Paul McCartney’s post 9/11 gig. ¹

And, from the last album, Reality:

And finally a 2002 remake of London Boys from the unreleased Toy album:

Edit: one more I’d not seen before, the unbleached original of Life on Mars. This was a hit a couple of years after it was first released, on Hunky Dory, hence the post Ziggy look and imagery on a song that was recorded before Bowie had reinvented himself as the doomed glam icon.

My first major smile of 2012:

Warning: flowery language alert.

Sometimes it’s such a long time. A year.

They feel like roar past at quite a rate as they end, but going back through the music in each one in detail in December they somehow see almost eternal. Some of the stuff on this page seems like half a decade back.

The records I liked a lot in 2011 provided – I thought – a fairly short list as I mentally worked them through the other night.

And then I woke in the morn and tried to write this list down. I scanned iTunes and pulled apart the recently neatly stacked records and CDs on the shelf to try and work out exactly what I’ve listened to in 2011.

It grew.

Of course this list would be longer If I added in all the older records I either discovered or re-discovered in 2011. I’d be forced to add two Bowie albums from his largely ignored later years (the common wisdom of course is that his ‘interesting’ career path ended abruptly after Scary Monsters in 1981), Heathen and 1. Outside, or the compete 70s oeuvre of Gil Scott-Heron after he passed, or countless old 12” singles that took my fancy for a day or two whilst I banged them to death only to forget them again for a year or perhaps more – The timeless FK EP anyone?

I’ve added a couple of re-discoveries or reworkings, the Trax and Nu Groove re-edits, and the never actually fully released before Smile simply it seemed wrong not to.

However mostly the records here are new and new sounding enough for me to offer another blast of hogwash at Simon Reynolds’ Retromania thesis and to anyone who leapt all over it this year. So…

The old:

Various – Trax Re-edited (Harmless)

I’ve already done this one in detail, and my post had a couple of reposts. Suffice to say, I’m not wanting to re-edit those words. They’ll do.

And Trax Re-edited still does.

Various – Nicholas: Back on Track Nu Groove (Needwant)

As Trax was to Chicago I guess you could say that Nu Groove was to the big Apple. It was the label that rode the path to the future in that city in the late 1980s, and in a way it was more important. Not only was it not run by charlatans, as Trax was, but it encouraged invention (at Trax that was largely incidental/accidental) and created a huge part of what we thought of as electronic music (Dance Music doesn’t work – this wasn’t just music to dance to) in the next decade and beyond.

Nicholas is a 25 year old Italian who has embraced all that, perhaps in a way that only a younger person not in awe of the legacy could do, and twisted a dozen key moments into something both vaguely contemporary and reverential, albeit not claustrophobically so.

As with the Trax album, he hasn’t tried to force these songs onto a modern dancefloor, and in a world awash with awful remixes of songs you loved that’s important to me.

The remix of Houz’ Nergroz (producer Rheji Burrell, who along with his brother Ronald played a key role at the label) ’92 classic How Do You Love A Black Woman, a dramatically sensual fusion of raw r’n’b, King Tubby, and what we were to call deep house in years to come, is worth the price of admission to me. He tags it the “Fierce Beats Remix” but it’s far more provocative than that. Instead he draws out and teases with the famous lo-fi organ refrain and taunts with a snippet of the vocal sample that punctuated the original. It pads and sways in a way that simply restates just how important Nu Groove was to so much that came afterwards.

That music is as important to me as this next record:

The Beach Boys – The Smile Sessions (Capitol)

As I tweeted or maybe Facebooked – if you don’t get Brian Wilson I can’t help you.

I’d like to develop that line just a little more, but it may offend.

How does somebody not get Brian? Unless they’re Mike Love in which case they make up for it by consciously and continuously belittling him, screwing him and then bathing in the credit and income he’s bought you thereafter. And reforming the band to bleed him just one more time.

I digress – but I probably needed to, and now I’ll finish the diversion the way it should always be finished: Fuck Mike Love. Really.

Prior to 1966 just about the only people to have added external sounds to pop music were Shadow Morton and Spector, and they limited it to rain, thunder and a motorbike. In ’66, with Pet Sounds Brian Wilson took that a little further. Let’s Go Away For a While and the title track were the amongst the first pop records that tried to conjure something more than just fun and emotional attachment to a person or a thing. The first of the two, an instrumental that blissfully evoked a journey and was an aural and subjective precursor to Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express, offers the most direct suggestion of what was to come – or not come at least for some 45 years (officially) – with Smile.

And that makes Brian Wilson a spiritual and conceptual godfather of much of what I’m writing about below, from sonic guitars to the bass-based revolution that dominates the last part of the first decade of the twenty first century.

So here we have a story – I think, as I’m still not quite sure what it is in this Barnum and Bailey concoction – built using farmyard and building site noises, layered/structured warm analogue audio complexity that we seem to have lost the ability to create in these digital days, gorgeous harmonic progressions and cadences, intensely psychedelic melodic tangents – sometimes rambling – with such scope they could really only be handed down by a semi-crazed drug-fucked genius deaf in one ear.

And of course inclusive of Brian’s finest composition – Surf’s Up.

A few million words have been expended on Smile since 1967 and I don’t feel much need to add many more (although I guess I have), suffice to say this release is perfectly structured to accommodate the level of intense anorakism – with boxed sets and outtakes galore, many of which offer more insight into the semi-finished album on offer than the album itself – the customer feels comfortable with. And now resplendent in the sort of sonic quality and finality those shitty bootlegs never offered (and I own a few).

It’s everything you wanted it to be, way better than the still worthy solo remake in 2004, and it’s every part of what you wanted to hear or deconstruct of the legend – you choose – and as with the mighty Pet Sounds Sessions Box, offered in way that adds to the magic rather than stripping the mystery.

Me? I’m in the corner under a blanket with headphones very tightly on, listening over and over to the sublime Surf’s Up demo, ironically with all that stuff I rambled about up-thread stripped away.

The new:

She’s So Rad – In Circles (Round Trip Mars)

Let’s start the new stuff with an album that – and this and the one after are the only ones on this list I think – almost, and just almost – justifies Reynolds’ loudly voiced circular-obsessive pitch.

Does that matter? No, not at all. Music does not always need to be radical. I also like Nick Lowe and Mayer Hawthorne. And I dig this.

Guitar based rock has become an indulgence rather than a journey of discovery for me, but I still thrill to it – nothing quite kicks like amplified noise.

For all that, this sparkling record – which I first heard on 95bFm, so radio still offers discovery sometimes, albeit less and less if I’m honest – which draws a direct line back to Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, stopping off along the way at early power-pop, Wire’s Chairs Missing and that debut Jesus and Mary Chain longplayer (and yes, the opener Iceblock steals a chorus and melody from Real Life’s Send Me An Angel without obvious shame), was my day starter for several weeks. I’d wake with the ‘Don’t Forget / you never forget’ chorus of Circles, or the pseudo-modernism of Disco’s intro and tinsel chorus in my head.

The touches of electronica in the construction do give it a sheen of modernity but at its soul this is closer to The Ronettes or The Righteous Brothers than any reference point it might try to claim in 2011.

I don’t think this is record for the times, but it was my record for a time.

Thundercat – The Golden Age Of Apocalypse (Brainfeeder)

When I bought this unheard from Conch in Ponsonby, I asked what it sounded like. It sounds like an album made by a bass player Dustin said.

Oh.

Marcus Miller? Paul McCartney? Stanley Clarke? John Entwhistle? Bootsy?

But, yeah, he was absolutely right. I get it now.

A year or more in being recorded, The Golden Age Of Apocalypse seems to exist mostly because it was fun to make. There is no grander reason for it in the greater scheme, and the story goes that co-producer Flying Lotus, for whom Thundercat (= Stephen Bruner) plays bass, had to push the artist into finishing the fun and putting the thing into the marketplace so we could all enjoy.

Bass players make those sorts of records. Nobody else quite can. Think of The Fireman, or Jah Wobble, or, hell, the complete works of Larry Graham, post Sly – they simply groove and more or less ignore the commercial or artistic imperatives that limits or corrals the records made by musicians who were driven instead to be vocalists or lead guitarists (McCartney straddles both camps, but he’s Paul McCartney, and he either invented or at some stage restated most camps).

Dreamy, lazy, unpredictable, soulful, and – I keep trying to convince myself –  thoroughly modern despite the fact it wraps itself around the likes of Herbie Hancock, Stanley Clarke and George Duke, I’ve dug this album a lot in the last few months.

And yet without aggressively struggling to achieve that artistic imperative, it achieves it nevertheless as it builds towards the last two tracks, the almost surreal semi-cinematic double act of Mystery Machine and the all too brief expanse of Return to The Journey.

I guess it’s nothing special, it is after all a bass player’s album. But in aspiring to be nothing special it is.

Altered Natives Presents The Guild Of Synchronists (Eye4Eye Recordings)

If this album contained only Danny Native’s 18 Ghost Hands it would be enough to sell it to me – the mighty Dee Patten revisited and stripped back to the rhythmic essence that made Who’s The Bad Man (originally on Leftfield’s Hard Hands label about ’95) one of my favourite singles of that decade.

But it doesn’t of course. This collection of assorted mostly unknowns, produced by Londoner Danny Yorke (ie. Danny Native), a follow on to 2010’s Tenement Yard album (there was a volume two this year), doesn’t break any new ground but still sounds rather magnificent at some volume as I bounce around the house (I no longer do clubs – I don’t want to be the sad old guy at the end of the bar), as it pulls together and lovingly restates the most thrilling – noisy – elements of dance and rave culture and does so with some panache.

It’s a joyous record, which just works.

Danny tweeted a few days back that he was somewhat disappointed at not being named in any end of year lists. Well, I might not be Pitchfork or Factmag but this was one the records I thrilled to most in 2011. Ok, Danny?

Blood Orange – Coastal Grooves (Domino)

Devonté Hynes was also Lightspeed Champion. Then he was the brief flavour of the month, with a most-likely spread in Mojo – which must be the kiss of death – and he released a country-folk-rock-lite album that had mixed reviews. As has this, but I don’t care because I like it. Lots. 

It’s odd. Like the misplaced soundtrack to some lost half-finished David Lynch movie – the cliched one where a confused and lost couple in an old broken Impala stumble into a beaten-down club for respite where they find David Sylvian fronting a pick-up band – played by Orange Juice.

Unless you place it that context it doesn’t make sense. Once you do, it does.

Yep, its eighties’ reference points are strong but structurally – the arrangements, and the space – have a now about them that betrays the latter part of the decade it was made in. It has to have arrived post Massive Attack, but, more, after Mathew Dear’s two solo longplayers and that solitary astounding album from Damian Lazarus.

Hell, there is no way this record could’ve arrived before The XX.

King Krule (True Panther Sounds)

The Guardian described this EP from the 17 yr old Londoner, known to his gran as Archy Marshall, as dub-lullabies, delivered in a post-Strummer twang.

Formerly Zoo Kid, this stuff is simply astounding. All of it.

That’ll do.

Kuedo – Severant (Planet Mu)

Jamie Teasdale takes the noises made on machines before punk came along in 1977 and pushes them into holes created by the urban soundscrapings of the twenty-first century.

To borrow without apology: It’s like Tangerine Dream and DJ Roc are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company, then mixed in Cinemascope (remember that).

Various – Bangs & Works Vol.2 (Planet Mu)

A year or so back I listed volume one of this in my 2010 list. In the twelve months since this sound has exploded, becoming the dominant gamechanger in contemporary music in 2011. From hip-hop to bass to IDM – plus anything else that touches on any of these – juke has radicalised the way music was made this year.

The whole Juke/Footwork ethos thrills me: brutalised snippets of random melody (with a clear debt to J Dilla although he was gentler in his appropriations) and sound, often violently digitalised and reassembled without respect or deference. It’s excites.

And I guess I’m not alone – at least half the releases on this page wear an influence, sometimes substantial, from the rush to embrace this sound.

I’d be foolish to describe this album as anywhere close to easy to listen to – it loops, crashes, soars, speeds and then often unpredictably stops in 26 sometimes rather brief (although the tracks are mostly longer than Volume 1 – there are actually semi-songs here) melodramatic bursts of intense energy. Like Dilla, it draws the melody out from small parts of larger creations, and amplifies that element before quickly casting it aside and moving on.

I don’t ever expect a wide audience for this, as much as I personally buzz to it. Its wider influence is undeniable though, which takes me to:

Patrice & Friends – Cashmere Friends (Sulk Records)

The most fun I had with a record in 2011.

Eighties r&b vocal samples – the big gorgeous but wretched ballad type, think Alexander O’Neal, Morris Day and Paul Lawrence – stripped of their post-boogie synths and structure and dragged in pieces, sometimes a tiny fraction, other times a whole verse, to a bass soundscape mostly defined by the aforesaid Chicago juke and the urban inventiveness of Britain’s eternally bleak urban spawls.

And thus, appropriately, this is made in Liverpool, in the same way the UK garages and clubs have ripped apart and subverted US underground sounds since The Beatles (and then often handed them back – witness the interesting US made stuff in the often very regressive and somewhat depressing Pitchfork 50 this year: it almost all draws from Britain’s cities).

Half the fun is trying to work out exactly where that verse comes from – what battered 12” tucked in the back of a box that I haven’t played for decades has that very familiar few seconds been lifted from? It’s a game that can drive you nuts.

Rustie – Glass Swords (Warp)

Most fun, part dua. A record to lift you back to mid-nineties rave culture, albeit with twists added from the present day.

What? No, me neither. I was well past rave culture by the mid 1990s, hanging out blowing whistles and sucking on various gases to get a thrill never quite did it for me. It was little like the ugly end of the punk era after 1980 – when the distant ‘burbs who never quite got it earlier on, all rushed to town and misunderstood. And, yes that’s as elitist and old-ist as fuck because it wasn’t my scene but it’s my page, so be it.

So mostly I liked this because it was both uplifting at a time when I needed inspiration and because of – once again – how it gathered past strands together and unashamedly modernised. A track like Surph might have all the synths and sway of an old Network kiddie-rave tune but the vocals and the production takes it bang into 2011. In late 2012 it will probably sound dreary, but I rarely take more than a handful of records I love with me from year to year, and this is one I know I’m just loving for the moment.

Omar-S – It Can Be Done But Only I Can Do It (FXHE)

House music has lasted far longer than it should have. It’s overstayed its welcome by a decade or more, and yes as cynical as I want to be about it, like rock’n’roll, which had its last inspired, non-recyling, moment around 1990, I’m still a sucker for a recording like this and I’m a sucker for Omar-S, who’s raw grooves travel their own individualist course.

This album is almost an anachronism in 2011 as electronic music flows and mutates at an increasing speed, driven by the past, the future and the technology, but it really doesn’t matter because – with the sole exception of the grating Look Hear Watch – with an unnecessary porno sample swamping the whole track – every track on here is agelessly sublime.

Machinedrum – Rooms (s) (Planet Mu) / Sepalcure (Hotflush)

What really gets me – at this particular moment, probably not in five minutes but I’ll write it down whilst I think of it in case it slips – is: who are all these people? Not specifically the two people who made these two records, but the hundreds of people who arrive every year, make astounding records and then seem to slip away. It’s mostly a 2000s phenomena – at least to the levels we now see it.

The thing is, at least half the people who have made the music I’m talking about on this page are new to me. I have never heard of them before. And I may not hear of them a year or so from now. Our turnover has accelerated and continues to do so.

Maybe I’m ignorant. Maybe the world has passed me by and I simply don’t know anything anymore. Or maybe it’s just become so pepper-shot democratised out there that the taste or market makers no longer make any rules that matter.

Almost no records make every list. In 1979 when I was a kid, Talking Head’s Fear of Music, Gang of 4’s Entertainment, Armed Forces, London Calling, Setting Sons and about a dozen other albums made every single end of year summation.

That was it unless you niched yourself in jazz, classical or country.

No longer – there are literally hundreds of records that are now amongst the best of 2011, and that’s a mighty thing. No longer are a few scribes and a few content-creating corporations defining what we like or should like. There is no need to feel insecure because you simply don’t get the widely touted top album. Or know who they are.

Now you make your own list and the rest be damned.

So – returning to this – I’d not spent much time with Travis Stewart, despite the fact his name had gone around and round since 2001, and he recorded for a well trendy label (Merck). It was more a case of other folks mentioning him and me not really taking the time to notice, and then when I heard Room (S) somehow feeling insecure or inadequite in the knowledge that I’d also missed things like this (from 2009):

Thus I comforted myself with the above personal meme. You can’t know everything.

And jumped into Machinedrum’s 8th or 9th album, depending on how you measure these things, on its own merits, partially based on the fact that Planet Mu is the one label that’s not let me down in the last year or two.

Room(s) finishes with a tune called Come1, a joyous tune which leads from a piano and percussive riff that really could’ve been lifted from an old UK house stormer, circa 1992 (think Congress ), it seems rather out of place here although the point of the placement seems obvious: none of the tracks before could’ve existed without it.

The ten earlier tracks provide a complex but grand amalgam of contemporary styles, genres, sub-genres, and mini-genres and it is all but none of those exactly – the parts have created a greater whole. A gorgeous, unique and utterly confident release that was as perfectly pop as a record could possibly be without feeling the need to be subsumed by a charge for the charts.

And in that way it will likely define this year far more as time passes than much of what we hear on radio and see in our top 40s. I feel the need to toss superlatives at Room(s), but can’t find anymore that don’t sound trite (I think I’m already sailing too close to that..), so I won’t.

Record of the year maybe?

And if that wasn’t enough, Sepalcure – Stewart with Praveen Sharma – have made an album that might also make claim to that. It’s odd to hear such a celebration of all things electronic, as filtered by the British underground, come from American producers, but so it is. The shambolic route that is the endless dissection and reassembly of all things dance and rhythmic by UK acts in the past twenty years or more provide the backdrop and elements necessary for this wonderfully soulful excursion that even borrows a line or two from Pete Townshend on one of the standouts, See Me Feel Me.

Less dense and arguably a little more flowery than Stewart’s epic solo disc, Sepalcure makes few claims to be much more than just a wonderful listen, an acceptable artistic indulgence. And so it is.

And I think I’m all the better for it.

Prison Garde – Système Hermès (Self Released)

Vaughn Robert Squire is from Vancouver and is a big part of the reason Canada has become really interesting musically in recent years. Free to all comers via his website  (there is a new album up there in the past day or so, but I’ve had no time to listen).

Stylistically this sits in the never-never land from long long ago, where genres sat together comfortably – where house music and hip-hop were related and ideologically co-existed. And thus you have deep, deep house – with clear references to the music found on that Nu Groove record above, next to hip-hop that knows both Pete Rock and Shadow. And it’s extraordinary, and sensual and quite timeless.

I like the way this record is intentionally un-numbered – you choose the track order that suits you. I find myself ordering the slower tracks – what could tentatively be called hip-hop – towards the end of this sprawling collection that embraces styles that supposedly clash. To flow from the faster tracks – house if you need a descriptor, and mostly we do, to the down paced tunes makes sense.

Shlohmo – Bad Vibes (Friends of Friends)

From LA and unashamedly lo-fi, this album, an almost perfect melding of hip-hop and an alternative, almost folky ethos, was perhaps the most immediate thing I listened to all year. I feel in love with it first after finding this video on some site or other, and the album followed quickly.

A collection of ghostly, intensely melodic and irresistible mini-symphonies that sometimes feel almost too fragile to exist in the real world beyond the creator’s head, Bad Vibes is the opposite of much else I’ve liked in 2011 in that it’s not complex or technology driven. But for that that, I find this sits comfortably with the surreal, spectral aura of much of the best music I’ve heard and loved this year.

Stunning – really – stunning.

The Weeknd – House Of Balloons (Self Released)

A record that was given away for free in huge numbers to become one of the key noises of 2011.

And yes, it’s almost too late to say anything more about it as it became the hipster album – they call it a mixtape but the line is at best arbitrary surely – to own and love this year. I did both despite its ubiquity and omnipresence – and Drake’s latter day anointment.

A video or two will do:

and a remix:

@Peace (Self Released)

I’ve long had a strong love-dislike thing going on with New Zealand hip-hop. Every time I fall head over heals with something – and there have been more than a few moments across the years – I get bludgeoned in short order by something else that misses the point so awfully that it drives me away.

And then there is this – a bonafide classic of underplayed homeliness, culturally unique, for want of a better word but there rarely is one, soul that buries all those cringe factors once again and takes me back home again.

I worry that the system is so restricted in New Zealand these days, so defined by a very few anointed big acts, that the wealth of fascinating acts, like @peace, often slip through the cultural cracks. Why isn’t this album everywhere? Is it on mainstream radio? Or then, perhaps it is and I missed it from afar. It did however take a couple of clued up friends to point me towards it.

Why do I search YouTube and get “No video results for “@peace””?  The NZoA grants list seems to be devoid of their name. Hopefully it’s just because they haven’t asked.

Sure, it has a clear debt to the seminal Native Tongues posse, and whilst it is arguably somewhat unadventurous musically, the sounds are still sublime and it speaks to me in way most hip-hop in 2011 doesn’t. The words are considered, evocatively emotional and uniquely those of a young voice in the country I grew up in and call home, and that makes it much more than just another hip-hop record.

This is quite special.

Pinch & Shakleton (Honest Jon’s Records)

What any ugly word dubstep has become. It’s the ultimate musical hate word now. Much like Prog was in 1977 or Trance in 2000. Grumpy old men sit in cafes complaining that the clubs have become infested by ‘dubstep’. Forums rage against it. There are dozens of Facebook pages like <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dubstep-needs-to-die/100427843330164″>this.

And then there are records like this: wonderful, dramatic, almost ethereal at times, inspired and organic collections that hover around the history of the term but have long ago moved on from the thing that so many love to despise.

These two – Pinch (Rob Ellis) and (Sam) Shackleton – defined the progressive edge of the genre and Pinch’s Underwater Dancehall, from 2007, sits comfortably as one of the decades classics. From it emanated so much, and yet here we are four years on with an album that makes Dancefloor seem almost Neolithic.

The ghost of post-punk past – not the sounds, but the ethic – infuses this. It’s radical, experimental and soothing all the same time. It takes few prisoners but offers up little resistance when you want to love it.

And then you do. Or at least I do.

Andy Stott – Passed Me By / We Stay Together (Modern Love)

A couple of years back I rather fell for Andy Stott’s Unknown Exception, a compilation of his earlier vinyl releases. I liked, then loved and swooned around to it, despite the fact that little on it was in anyway sonically innovative. It was – simply – a gloriously warm, heavily melodic, comfortable melding of classic deep-house and nu-techno that I loved to have around.

Despite my love affair (and the fact that I still play it all the time) I mostly lost touch with Stott’s releases thereafter. His name would appear on release sheets, I’d see the odd track on Boomkat or Phonica, but unintentionally I’d lose the thought to listen in the increasingly disorganised – and sometimes frantic – way I hunt the internet for new music.

And then came Passed Me By, and, a month or two later, its sequel We Stay Together. A couple of online reviews drove me back towards the guy and I bit.

In a way I’m glad I didn’t try and cross the ground between the compilation and this duo of less than full length releases (both are around 35mins) because that allowed me to approached the first of these, Passed Me By, as a novice – unprepared – and I wasn’t led down or confused by what may have been a fairly uncomfortable route to this place (I’ve since taken a couple of inquisitive steps backwards into 2009 and 2010 and I’m not unhappy I missed the stop 0ffs).

Passed Me By, and the record that followed, have almost no relationship with Unknown Exception, aside from a name. You can’t draw an unbroken line between the three.

So instead of the traditional electronic dance landscapes of the earlier work, Stott now confronts and challenges the listener with something that sounds like the aural equivalent of Logan’s Run. The albums, or album if we consider these to be one work – are almost leaden in their slow post apocalyptic grind, which sounds awful but is majestically quite the opposite.

There is an obvious debt to the fractured tonality of Actress, and yet Arthur Russell’s most adventurous and intriguing work is all over these records, as is the minimalism electronica of The Field, Shackleton and Maurizio and yet it is none of these as this work stretches the relationship between techno, dub and texture just that little further.

Bleak, dark, and extraordinarily beautiful, perhaps the album/s of the year.

——

This was an amazing, wonderful year to be listening to new music.

As an aside, every one of these – with the exception of She’s So Rad and Thundercat – I own the digital edition of. This is the year I mostly dispensed with CD altogether, and will now, unless unavoidable, purchase on file and vinyl.

Oh, I guess I missed these:

When I was young, Dad used to come home from his journeys around the world with the airforce and we’d sit entranced by the stories he’d tell us of the places and people he’d met and seen.

On Sunday evenings we would, from time to time, gather in the living room with a rug on the floor for we kids and have the dual treat of being able eat dinner away from the table and – more importantly  - sit and watch as Dad went through some of the hundreds of slides he’d taken on his Leica as he travelled. He’d assemble the projector, fill a carousel and we would sit for hours looking at the wondrous still images, some which we had seen dozens of times before but despite that, still retained that initial magic.

There were also many of our young lives in Singapore. A couple of those are here including one I love of my brother wandering in front of the new family Plymouth. Our landlady there was a Mrs. Lee. Her son was to become the first Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, and my parents kept in touch with her for years afterwards, until the 1970s.

The magic of those slides stayed with me and I think they are a primary reason I found myself in some of the places in those pictures in my later life.

As we grew older these boxes of slides were placed in larger boxes and then stored carefully, but increasingly forgotten. As years turned into decades every now and then I’d mention these to Dad and he and I would agree that they needed scanning. But time being what it is…

Then, in 2010, Dad, who is now in his 80s, decided he’d put aside the time to scan these. Over the next few months – with a borrowed high-end scanner – he processed several hundred of these and put them on disks, copies of which he gave to each of his kids.

This is still a work in progress but slowly I’ve been cleaning these up. There are still many more – perhaps some 300 – which are still waiting, but I thought I’d put the first batch of Dad’s slides – mostly taken when he was either Flight Lieutenant, or later, Squadron Leader Brian Grigg, RNZAF – online. Some capture history, some capture family and some are just plain fabulous.

And I feel like I’m nine years old on the rug eating Sunday dinner again…..

[Show as slideshow]

So the United States wants to re-engage the Asia Pacific region.

In the wake of the wind-down and relative failure of the war/post-war periods in Iraq (ok – lets call it a defeat: the dominant power in that region is now Iran, the insurgents are either running parts of Iraq or hold the power balance in the government, the country is ethnically cleansed, there is still no fucking electricity and the US have been forced to huddle their remaining troops in client gulf states) and the impending drawdown in Afghanistan, likely with similar results to Iraq, the United States has now decided to transfer part of and flex its not inconsiderable muscle in the region, arguing that it is making up for lost time as it lost focus over the past decade.

Despite the facade of unity at the recent Bali ASEAN leaders gig, there is clear and obvious disquiet across much of the region. Regardless of  this it’s pretty obvious that the US intends to do what the US intends to do and to hell with most everyone else. As always.

There are several possible reasons I can think of.

Firstly the United States is now a permanent war economy – it maintains a massive military machine, a vast intelligence apparatus and an even bigger military-industrial and support base and needs to continue maintaing these in order the forestall a crash that would dwarf 2008 if it didn’t. Millions of people and countless industries are part of this war economy and are dependent on the United States either being at war or having an armed confrontational posture around the world.

Secondly – distraction, and the need to be seen to be doing something to counter the downturn and those who are popularly perceived to be in large part responsible for it. The economic mess they are now in is a stinking quagmire that is not improving despite billions thrown at it, seems resistant to the change in fundamentals necessary, and has mutated into confused desperation as the dream which was never supposed to crumble, falls apart. That desperation has manifested itself in several ways: the nutty and contradictory Tea Party, which brings together dangerously all the arch-conservative, paranoid, ill-informed and extremist elements that have been gathering pace in the USA in recent decades (or, in the case of the national delusion they call American Exceptionalism, has festered for many decades), the OWS movement, and the boogie man.

The boogie man used to be Soviet Russia (and ‘Red’ China), then it was radical Islam (which still has its claws in the national psyche) and now it’s just China. China is the boogie man. And that’s number three: confront the boogie man and we’ll all get our jobs/industry/global standing (as conferred on us by American Exceptionalism) back. It’s an extended real world Truman Show scenario – with the US playing Truman and the the rest of the world looking in, and it runs all through Congress – both sides – and the administration: it’s Chinese currency manipulation/protectionism/bad labour practices/aggression/price fixing. Insert any or as many of those as you wish. Address those and the American dream returns.

So when Obama makes a profoundly arrogant – racist – statement instructing China to “play by the rules”, he is effectively telling the most populous and increasingly developed nation in the world to do as they are told; we are Americans, you are are Asiatics, we make the rules, you have no right to do that, and to enforce our self-anointed role as the global rule maker we’ll flex our military muscles at you as and where necessary.

The East would be so much easier if it were all still Suzie Wong.

However there are problems with this. Firstly the United States hasn’t been a peacemaker in the region since the end of the Korean War. Its adventures took the lives of millions in South East Asia in the 50s, 60s and 70s including handing Cambodia to Pol Pot and then supporting him when the Vietnamese tried to resolve the horrors. It played an active part in the coup that overthrew Sukarno in Indonesia, the aftermath of which was the extended horrific massacre of up to a million people some of whom were condemned on a CIA provided hit list, plus a 30 dictatorship. It then supported and armed the invasion of East Timor and has recently begun working with the same Indonesian special forces currently ‘suppressing’ the West Papuan independence movement with violence.

The only part of Asia were you could argue that it’s maintained the peace is Korea.

Its military sits permanently at the Chinese sea-border, nuclear armed, and continually prods at their territory with spy planes and vessels in a way that they would never tolerate at home if it were to be reversed. It continually encourages the disputes between China and other South East Asian nations in the South China Sea where it is an agent provocateur formenting mischief.

Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand repeatedly rebuffed its attempts to join the joint task force guarding the Straits Of Malacca. It’s the last thing any of them want.

Secondly, the idea that the US military can, to quote Obama, “fulfil its commitment to the entire Asia-Pacific region” by military posturing is absurd. The only time the US and China entered into a shooting war the US was routed, all the way down the Korean peninsula, and it was only able stop the shooting by using all its massive military muscle to force a stalemate that continues to this day. And that was against a peasant army with a massive disparity in arms and technology. At the end of 2011 no such disparity exists and world’s largest military – in numbers – would likely rout any conventional US military assault or threat again.

Thirdly, it’s not your region – look at a map – go away. At least that seems to be the unspoken in large parts of the region. It was notable that the Thai government quickly rejected US naval help in the floods -aside from mapping assistance later on, as Hilary rushed into Bangkok. The phrases “Global recession” or “Global Downturn”  have huge currency in the west at the moment, but there is no recession in most of Asia, no downturn, quite the opposite. Across the region, despite endless predications of imminent collapse from the west, everyone is doing quite nicely thank you. The Thai floods have had a huge global impact across a range industries from cars to electronics to food – they hit stock prices in Wall Street and Tokyo – but their $10Bn price tag is but a blip in a growth pattern that is reflected across Asia.

And they want to keep on doing nicely. US bull-in-a-china-shop destabilisation is neither desired nor helpful as Asia comes into its own as an economic powerhouse. The rules of the party have changed and the USA has gone from handing out the dance cards to being a wallflower, albeit an armed one looking for an excuse to bare those teeth.

Bizarrely the agreement is to place 2,500 Marines in Australia, in Darwin. This places them not at the foot of China but squarely underneath Indonesia. How odd. Well not really – I doubt anyone closer to China would have them.

And Australia must be rather thrilled to be asked. It already has B-52′s in the Northern Territory from time to time and Australia has long been the junior partner in the Western Alliance desperate to be seen as a major player but never quite getting there, so one can imagine the glee in Canberra when this was agreed.

There was a time when Australia was convinced Indonesia was going to invade and built a multi-billion dollar series of bases across the top of the country to defend against this. Any of the hundreds of thousands of Ockers who have been to Bali could’ve told the military that Indonesia can’t even keep the traffic lights going reliably, let alone transport an invasion force across water and desert. It was absurd and must have caused some mirth in Suharto’s Jakarta (especially as the Australians were also arming his troops on the other hand).

In 2012 the threat posed to the Australian nation by Indonesia is zero.

And so Hillary is going to Myanmar. It is, so the media has been primed to tell us, on the cusp of democracy. It seems nobody has told the generals this – hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail with little movement beyond a token release earlier this year as part of a general amnesty.

Myanmar has been designated ground zero by the USA in the impending confrontation with the boogie man. And sitting across the border – given the US history in South East Asia – it’s very, very scary.

The US attempts to find a client state here is like a page out of the cold war history books, it’s South Vietnam, Guatemala and Cambodia all over again, and without the teeth that gives it credibility unless they go nuclear.

And then there are no winners.

Here’s Francis Wade from the Democratic Voice of Burma, in an Al Jaz Op/Ed, giving a more detailed view of all this (and I’d suggest reading the whole thing, it’s pretty powerful):

Ominous signs already suggest that the US will saddle up to repressive regimes in order to realise its overarching priority for returning here, that of containing China and penetrating deeper the region’s markets.

and

History tells us however that the standards the US sets for its allies are wildly inconsistent and arbitrary. Much of the talk on Burma among White House officials is of “reform”, and less so that of “democracy”, allowing Naypyidaw some flexibility in the benchmarks it is required to meet.

One hopes that Myanmar is slowly heading in the right direction, but it’s worth noting that the civilian leader  is a former general and is still heading a government absolutely under the thumb of the same military who have been the bad guys for decades. The 2010 election was almost universally decried as fraudulent, but despite that the current US administration is sidling up to them as they did so many times with awful regimes in Central America, Africa and the Middle East in the 20th century.

This sort of embrace of ‘reforming’ despotic regimes by the US has a recent precedent too: it was less than a decade back when Libya and its leader were warmly welcomed back into the circle of nations by the last US Administration and the UK as reforming. I’m more confused than ever by the rights and wrongs of the last ten months in Libya but the hypocrisy there is glaring.

This will not end well.

I think I mentioned Andrew Dubber’s Deleting Music blog once before. Yes I know I did.

He’s been kind enough to mention this blog a few times too.

It seems an appropriate time to mention it again in the wake of the possibility (and I’ll say that, because until the EU sings it’s still up in the air) that EMI is going to be absorbed by Vivendi Universal next year.

In my quick, very much off the cuff, thoughts about this a week or two back, there was one thing that I found more disturbing than anything else, even though I didn’t develop it at the time, and it’s not really been dealt with anywhere that’ve seen, in the mad rush to proclaim a victory for the ‘music people’ (I’m not sure exactly what this means – Warners and Sony are no more or less ‘music people’ than Universal in my experience. Indeed the current head of Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. is Doug Morris who built Universal to what it is over the past decade). That the most quoted person here was silly old Mick Jagger, a man who probably lost touch with the people, music or otherwise, around the time of his last half decent contemporary album back in ’78, doesn’t help.

I’ll repeat what I said in that last post:

• It’s a negative for back catalogue. Expect more of the vast catalogue owned by the group to languish unheard. Once again there simply isn’t the time or resources there to ensure it gets the space it needs.

Man, that’s an understatement.

Consider the labels and their catalogues Universal will control or have under its wide wing:

Polydor, Decca, Philips, Vertigo, EMI, Parlophone, Harvest, Angel, Capitol, A&M, Island, Motown, Columbia (the EMI one), His Master’s Voice, Deutsch Grammophon, Pye, United Artists, MCA, Liberty, Imperial, Chess, Blue Note, GRP, CTI, Impulse, Fantasy, Apple, Charisma, Electrola, Cooltempo, Ruthless, Bronze, Mercury, BASF, MPS, Deram, Death Row, Trojan, Backstreet, Dot, Paramount, Roulette, London, FFRR, Odeon, United Artists, ABC, Smash, Dunhill, Geffen, DGC, Pathe Marconi, Regal Zonophone, Hollywood, TK, Go-Beat, 4th & Broadway, Duke, Peacock, Sanctuary, Chrysalis, Virgin, Ten, Siren, Mango, Rocket, Def Jam, Interscope, EmArcy, Polar, Dreamworks, Talkin’ Loud, Solar, Fontana, Tabu, Verve, Pablo, RSO, Fiction, MGM, Urban, Motor Music, Casablanca, Manhattan, Coral and Universal itself.

There are countless more. That list doesn’t include the many, many regional labels or most of the labels absorbed by both companies in the cloudy recesses of history. Nor does it account for the vast size of many of those catalogues –  at Discogs the EMI label on its own lists some 22,000 releases, Polydor 28,000, Island 13,000, and ….well you get the idea.

There are massive vaults (the good news) that go back to the end of the the 19th century in several locations around the world, full of tapes, imagery, graphics, masters and digital data, as well as regional archives (although not in New Zealand – the PolyGram and EMI archives were long ago trashed). Given their respective histories (both go back to Emile Berliner‘s European branches in the late 1890s) they would hold the copyrights for at least 1/2, or – not unreasonably – closer to 2/3 or all music recordings currently in copyright (recently extended in the EU to stretch it back to well over half the period since recording began) and at least that percentage as a total of all music ever recorded by record companies, bearing in mind that both EMI and UMG have absorbed a large number of companies that have themselves gobbled up many indies.

It’s terrifying and there is absolutely no way any one record company can understand, curate or do justice to a catalogue of that volume.

So what happens to it?

Well, that’s the easy part of it: the star and major cult acts get endless deluxe reissues, a few fans periodically compile a few collections after convincing some exec that there is money in this and other passionate souls in the company rework or revitalise the small part of the catalogue that they personally have a thing for.

The odd boutique division will appear and, as the company loses interest in the minimal return for work put in, it will get quietly folded. This pattern has been repeated across the majors many times over the years and this uber-merger will likely throw up a few such archival projects or labels. Universal currently has Hip-O Select, who’s releases have included some wonderful Motown sets, and their Japanese divisions have long been active in recycling things like jazz and prog-rock. Unfortunately Hip-O Select, if you look at their website which is copyrighted 2006, have almost no resources and thus their scope is very narrow. Another catalogue label was launched a couple of years back, supported by an exec who was soon moved on, and got no further than a press releases and a website announcing its imminent arrival.

It released nothing.

But, mostly, the bulk of the past will disappear forever. The Long Tail was a nice theory which turned out to be a myth and there is little interest in exploring costly ways of not making it so. Even if, with the best of intentions, Universal throw substantial resources into making their history available there is almost no way a single company can retail and market that much music adequately without it simply overwhelming the company.

The obvious answer is to pass the catalogue onto specialist independents but major labels have long shown a reluctance to do so – they acquire catalogue rather than disperse it – since the days of Rhino, who licensed all sorts of archival material from Warners and invented the smart compilations and themed albums we took for granted in the late 1990 and 2000s. Unfortunately they did it so well, Warners decided they would buy the company. This they did – and slowly suffocated it before shutting it down.

Say goodbye to 80% of everything ever released on those labels I listed above.