When a wise close friend tells one on Christmas morning, by phone from Australia no less, to take care and to say no if you have any doubts, you should probably heed the advice.

Four hours later I tossed that advice around from one side of my mind to the other as I stood sheltering in the Scoot office on the Sanur beachfront…sheltering from the squalls of rain that were whipping across the grey expanse of the beginnings of the Lombok Straits…one of the world’s deepest sea channels, and the divide between Bali’s mainland and the usually tranquil Nusa Lembongan. Do we go or do we stay and wait….ahhh, fuck it all, let’s go. How bad can it be? After all, Indonesia hasn’t a history of marine disasters, and the weather can’t get that bad, surely. Brigid asks the smiling girl in the green uniform with the clipboard who says, reassuringly, that it might just be “a little bit bumpy”.

So off we go, convincing ourselves that the storm that’s been rocking Sanur all morning is easing, that the big grey blob on the horizon is actually dark blue, and into the smallish Scoot motor launch which I tell myself is well and truly ready for anything, noting the lifejackets, GPS and obvious flares. And the crew, naturally, are very experienced.

That the captain / driver (I don’t know what one calls these people…it’s a boat, not a ship, but he does seem to have a two man crew) is chain smoking in direct, we are to find out on the return trip, defiance of Scoot rules, should have meant something. But, this is Indonesia and people smoking in confined spaces regardless of the discomfort of others is, like people who have no idea how to drive having full reign over the roads, something you take for granted.

The first few hundred metres, perhaps even kilometre or two, was relatively fine. As the lady said, a little bit bumpy. Aside from the engine stalling before we passed the Sanur reef of course (although the folks we spoke to on the return journey yesterday..which took some courage, mind..said that the day before they’d floated adrift for ¼ an hour before the crew had convinced the outboards to return to life). Then the first squall hit and off we went. Vision, in any direction quickly reducing to about two metres, the captain sent one of his crew, fag in hand, through the front hatch onto the bow, where, unattached to the vessel, he sat, god knows how he managed to…and the fag went out… for the next forty minutes and directed the captain with hand signals. I’m guessing that without his guidance, our next landfall may well have been Flores.

That aside, after the first twenty minutes it all went rather calm again. Of course calm is a relative term when that means the boat is simply crashing from mountainous wave to wave instead of lurching at an almost 90 degree side-wards swivel as we’d been a few moments earlier.

And, so, we thought it was over, in a good way. I guess I should’ve taken rather more notice of the frantic waving from the chap at the front and the nervous toothy grin emanating from the third crewman sitting opposite.

The cause of the frantic waving was, we were shortly to find out, the impending moment when we were to enter the collision zone between the famously brutal currents that rush past the bottom of Lembongan out of the Nusa Cenida / Nusa Penida channel (which is notorious for sucking innocent Korean snorkelers out of the mouth of Crystal Bay and handing them back three days later) and the fast rising gales whipping down the west coast of Lembongan.

And then we thought it was all over, in a really bad way. The waves were now substantially higher than the boat, the frantic man up front was literally holding on for his life as tower block sized waves crashed down on him. And the captain’s eyes bulged as he gunned the engines, which now seemed to be spending more and more time in the air as the nose of our scoot plunged into the wall of water.

And then it was as calm as a Lilly pond (relatively speaking of course) and the captain smiled and said “Ok?” And we all got off.

The rain pelted down at Tanis Villas and we played 3 handed 500 and our pirated  magnetic Indonesian Monopoly set (includes Train Station of Tokio, Harbour of Sidney and Unio Soviet amongst its properties but pays $20,000 on passing go…however you go around the wrong way and nothing is colour coded correctly, a bit like the country of manufacture).

And had a drink at the local cafe, but avoided the specialty cocktail.

How was your Christmas?

Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

Its getting lot of press pretty much everywhere at the moment, and there isn’t much there that hasn’t been said many times before but David Byrne’s Wired musings on the state of the recording industry as it relates to artists and record companies ties it all together rather well and is well worth the time to read. And the conversation audio snips with Brian Eno are very much worth the extra few minutes if this topic is of interest. These are not minor players.

the ghost of XMAS past…..lest we forget….Prego 2004 (and suffice to say we were just observers….seriously..)

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done……..and all that nonsense of course.

Here in our corner of the world you’d be hard pressed to work out that you were slap bang in the middle of the most populous Muslim country on the lord’s (whichever one is yours) planet. Java is perhaps different (although the malls are all decked with fake holly and bells there too), but in Bali they certainly do the holidays well..all of them, be they Christian (bearing in mind there are more Christians in Indonesia than there are people in Australia), Muslim, or, naturally, Hindu.

The serving staff and shops and restaurants are all beaming underneath their Santa hats and fake snow…oh yes. In Ace Hardware, in the always oddly deserted Kuta Istana Mall (right next to the giant fake snow and ice fantasy pavilion that the locals queue year round to enter) the almost life-size nativity diorama (a snip at Rp3,000,000…about US$320) and the 5 metre high fake Chrissie trees (only Rp5million) seem absolutely illogical, but as someone recently said, Indonesia would not be Indonesia if you threw logic into the national mix.

Indonesians are very, very good at celebrating just about anything.

And the Chinese restaurant we went to tonight had all the trimmings including a much better class of fake Santa hats than I’ve ever seen in New Zealand.

When we had The Box and Cause Celebre we enforced a strict no Santa hats policy at this time of the year. We could, of course, have been accused of being grumpy old men. But more likely we just didn’t want the roaming meat-head, office party factor coming down the stairs. A no-Santa hats policy was easier than explaining repeatedly to people: you are drunk and you look like a twat so you are not welcome…..

None of this has anything to do with the main purpose of this post which was to pop up a couple of Kevin Saunderson tracks that have been sitting on my server for about six months waiting for me to remember, and the Box / Santa hat thing twigged my memory, as both of these were monstrous at said club. I’ve a soft spot for Saunderson’s Inner City, what with the soaring Paris Grey vocals, and the happy line they drew between the pure Detroit techno that Kevin was instrumental in pioneering (legend has it he coined the term) and dancefloor anthems. IC are well served by compilations and track appearances here and there, but usually in their OG form, with the raft of rather exceptional remixes generally being MIA. So with that in mind I thought I’d post a couple here:

Firstly, the Dave Clarke mix of Ahnonghay, which may or may not be my favourite single in any genre from the 90s (this came out in 1995) depending on the day. The DC mix is good old fashioned, rush to the floor almost banging tech-house (before there was such a thing) but pretty much manages to hint at the searingly beautiful original, tucked away on the flip, next to an equally lovely, though quite different, very purist, Carl Craig mix…..

Inner City- Ahnonghay (Dave Clarke Mix) (6 X 6, 1995).

And then, as is to provide a contrast, from further back, 1989, to be exact, come the rather legendary Def Mix of Whatcha Gonna Do With My Lovin’, which was extraordinarily hard to find new until the recent Defected Def Mix collection came out. Sadly, that collection has it only as part of a rather patchy mixed triple CD (such a wasted opportunity), and it’s still hard to find on its own. So to rectify that, here you go, complete with the classic lush Knuckles / Morales rolling groove and the lovely drop down to a downtempo Move Your Body riff at 4.55.

Inner City – Whatcha Gonna Do With My Lovin’ (Def Mix)(Ten 1989)

I’ve blogged a best of the year styled list for quiet some years now and I guess I need to do something similar, if only to satisfy myself. I don’t really like these lists simply because there are so many records I’ve simply not heard, probably more than ever, being, as I am, somewhere to the left of Papua new Guinea these days. Bali is not a great place to acquire music. You can buy a pirated copy of virtually any pop disc with a week of international release. But anything interesting is almost an impossibility. Fortunately I get to travel a bit and, to Brigid’s enduring bemusement, my first stop in almost any city is whatever independent record store I can track down. Some places are better than other. Singapore has nothing of interest..the corporates have strangled it and its record shops are as soulless as its other shopping (unless you want something electrical). On the other hand, if you know where to go, Bangkok, and Jakarta are both absolute goldmines.

Thank god for all the freebies I continue to get in the mail (thank you), and of the course the internet in its various retail and digital forms.

So, rambling ahead, below are the records I heard that I liked a lot this year…

I had a brief love affair with Studio’s pretty album West Coast a month or so ago, but after a week or two it felt a little twee and overly try-hard in places, although their Escape From Chinatown, with Brennan Green is rather lovely. But, to be honest I’m finding much of the Scandinavian nu-Balearica a bit much now, that said however Origin off the album is still an absolute classic, and for that track alone its worth a mention.

And that track is not a million miles away from one of my most played albums of 2007. I’m cheating because The L.E.D.S debut was released in 2006, but I didn’t get it until June..so…I’ve already gone on at length here about how much I loved this album, and suffice to say I’ve been thrashing the unmixed tracks from the unreleased second album that they were kind enough to send to me. Why in gods sake don’t these people have a record deal???

NZ wise, it’s easy to lose touch but I liked the Phoenix Foundation’s Bright Grey, despite that fact that it was resoundingly old fashioned, like a happy warm kiwi rug. It was just a nice song and stood out from the relentless chaff on the Kiwi Hit Discs. I’ve yet to hear the album.

My other NZ moment was the mighty Something Error Happens by The Others Requiem, but hey, I’m biased and rather proud of it.

I got a buzz from the one off supergroup The Good, the Bad and The Queen, mostly because of the lopping bass playing from the long missing in action (musically anyway) Paul Simonen. The former Clash-man is my favourite rock’n’roll bassist ever but it was a wake up call how old and weedy the erstwhile glamour boy now looks (this was the year that Sid Vicious would’ve turned 50 after all..think about that!)

And talking of The Clash, the cover of The Call Up , as reworked by Martin Buttrich with The Far East Band is kinda perfect, mashing my nostalgia with a classic sparse dubby electronic thingy that builds for ten or so minutes with nice swooping synth lines. A huge favourite right now.

Yep, electronic music really is in really good shape, with the tail end of the minimal thing and the thing they call dubstep both turning out future classics. The two genres met in the Ricardo Villalobos mix of Shakletons’ Blood on My Hands, all 19 odd (and I mean that in every sense) minutes of the hypnotic, sparse, repetitive loopingness (new word I think) that only sounds like, ahh, Ricardo Villalobos. His sound is so thoroughly unique and so is he…taking his Fabric album and turning it into an artist album by only using his own productions could’ve failed embarrassingly but was, instead, rather a triumph, especially the middle where it gets quite quirkily nutty.

Other singles or tracks I liked: both sides of the Hercules & Love Affair single; Joakim’s Lonely Hearts; Aeroplane by, uhh, Aeroplane; the DJ Koze mix of The Battles’ Atlas (and I truly disliked the original); Rekorder 8; Francois K’s Road of Life as reworked in a very tracky manner by Quiet Village; the almost Planet Rock-ish (which brings it all back to the beginning) remix of Cybotron’s Clear by Cobblestone Jazz; Âme’s Balandine EP; Nard’s by Trusme; Anders Trentemøller’s Djuma Soundsystem mix, and his Evening with Bobi Bros and, god, dozens more…

Both the Burial album and the Pinch album (now out with a bonus disc..doesn’t that piss you off) easily sit in my favourite long players of 2007. I love the fact that dubstep is the bastard child of so many things, not least is the Bristol movement of the late eighties onwards.

And to Carl Craig….his side on the Kings Of Techno double was ruined by his crowd rousing voiceovers (unlike the sublime Laurent Garnier mix), but elsewhere he continued to excel, like the entrancing live remake of At Les on the Paris Live EP; the Angola-ish remix of Tony Allen’s Kilode; his Faze Action re-visit; and the remixes of Inner City, Siobhan Donaghy, the Lazy fat People. His take of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver was just another highlight in James Murphy’s calendar rather chocka full of them.

Anyway you look at it LCD ruled 2007. The Sound Of Silver album slayed almost everyone (almost..it utterly confused much of America, which is not surprising…middle America has been a Walmart driven musical vacuum for decades, as evidenced by all those god awful post frat bands the likes of Pitchfork so love to tout). And to top it off, the 45.33 Nike thing was finally given an official release. They are this decade’s great band.

It was completely different but the Nomumbah album Love Moves, recommended to me by Cian at Conch, remains the supreme, for want of a better word (and one is needed if we are to avoid all the horrendous connotations of the word), chillout, record. God knows how many afternoons I’ve played this, and I’m playing it as I type.

Kathy Diamond’s Miss Diamond to You was the torch vocal album of the year…it’s odd how all those faux Amy Winehouses and their ilk get the word when there are records this damned good smouldering away below the radar.

I have to admit a soft spot for the odd noisy band. The Arctic Monkeys, The Klaxons and Justice all found themselves getting played rather loudly in the bale on more than a few occasions. Snotty noise is good.

And on a completely different tangent, I found a place for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Rising Sand and was pleased to see that Plant has decided to put this project ahead of any bloody Zeppelin tour…the idea of which appals me…please, no…the man has soul.

There were lots of worthy reissues and re-releases. Over the years my copy of The Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth has almost worn through, but now, of course we have it remastered with two bonus discs, so I can file the vinyl.

The Eddie Kendricks collection, The Thin Man, featuring the second batch of his solo albums at Motown is quite something (even it was officially 2006), as is the recent Aretha outtakes double, and the two albums on Numero Group, Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label and Good God both of which I discovered this year.

And it wouldn’t, for me at least, be complete without mentioning the remastered Car Crash Set album..it’s not out until 2008 but if I can talk about records released before 2007, surely I can enthuse about one still to come….

Sitting with a friend, a German furniture manufacturer of some reputation here in Bali, a few days back and he was bemoaning the lack of precision in the country. The problem, it seems, comes from the Indonesian adherence to the centimetre as a the smallest unit of distance. The ‘Centi’ as it’s called here is the standard applied to all building and manufacturing processes. In much of the rest of the world (the USA aside, they’re still somewhere in the middle of the British Empire circa 1776, with inches and yards for gods sake) the millimetre is the defining unit, thus allowing for a level of precision that using centis prevents. I guess that explains the gaps in buildings all over the island. Indonesian architects may build fine multi storey malls and towers in Jakarta, the equal of any in Asia, but here in Bali, the builders and architects seem unable to make walls satisfactorily meet floors. Visit the newish Discovery Mall in Tuban (the link is worth a read..if their building skills are as good as their English, or their web design…), which just feels like its falling to pieces, and tell me it ain’t so.

However that said, I’m mightily impressed by the new footpaths that have been going down around the Kuta area over the past two years. They are well built, the stones fit snugly and they seem to be very disabled friendly, which is quite a step forward. In particular they all feature those yellow plastic middle tiles designed to aide blind folks navigate the streets.

However the footpath building spree seems to have ended, as most of the footpaths in the busy areas have been done and now, disabled or blind you can walk the streets of Kuta with increased confidence…..

So here we are in the midst of the UN climate talks in Bali, most of which is being held some 20km away from where I’m writing, at the gilded ghetto (that’s what it’s actually often called) of Nusa Dua.

It’s actually not been as bad as we all thought it might have been. 10,000, mostly lower level, functionaries, their spouses, and, by all accounts a swarm of the next generation of snake oil merchants, carbon credit merchants..mostly out of NYC it seems. The Americans may be the environmental bad boys but they are not adverse to making money out of Kyoto.

Lots of places one may have though would be rather over populated are quite quiet (see Ku de Ta on left last week), although the Queen’s Tandoor was pumping a couple of nights back.

The traffic has been the usual quagmire but apart from the odd bus full of spouses being dragged up to the silver shops or the monkey forest, screaming past on the bypass at 90 kmh with flashing police escort as all and sundry dive out of the way, not that much worse than before. Oh and there are guys in cheap plastic shades (all aged circa 17) standing on each corner with submachine guns, almost like Singapore. As Brigid pointed out, if one was to want to execute a very, very important person, a sniper shot to each of these guys first, as obvious as they are (and I really don’t think the guys arranging this are smart enough to have thought about hidden gunmen too..in RI its all about the obvious bravado) would allow an aspiring assassin free reign.

There are Indonesian navy patrol boats off shore too. I guess there is some concern about Al-Qaeda trained Sea Turtles on suicide missions.

My favourite comment so far is from the lady from Uganda who commented on how orderly and well behaved the traffic in Bali was. I’ve made a note to keep out of East Africa.

It’s a conference of contradictions to be sure.

Firstly there is the venue. Nusa Dua, built by the World Bank, in collusion with the Suharto family and assorted buddies has a bit of a taint to it in this part of the world, what with villages having being forced out without compensation, reefs being dynamited and the like. It’s a part of Bali’s often dark, and still unresolved (or admitted) past. It seems like an odd place for the World to come together to sort out its problems. That coupled with the fact that locals, unless they work there, are really not that welcome within its walled 60 acres (nor would they likely wish to..its a ghastly, horrendously overpriced, sterile sort of place with little soul populated by garish they-could-be-anywhere chain hotels).

Secondly the idea that over 100 jets needed to be parked in the region seems at odds to the whole concept of climate control..haven’t these people heard of plane pooling……

I’m not at all sure about any of this.