One of my favourite moments on disc in the mid 2000s came on the Kings Of Techno trib­ute to Detroit. French meister-DJ / pro­ducer / com­poser Lau­rent Gar­nier had slowly built up a wall of purist Techno and then, after a momen­tary pause, dropped it into the snare roll and hand­claps that begin the era defin­ing No Fun by The Stooges.

It was a moment of pure bril­liance, a moment that tied so much together, and a moment that said, more than a mil­lion words on paper or screen could pos­si­bly say, about the joined inter­ac­tive lin­eage of punk, soul, disco and techno.

It said, sim­ply, ‘I understand’.

As did Lau­rent Garnier’s CBGB T Shirt at Bed last night:

Laurent’s been the one elec­tronic musi­cian I’ve long wanted to, but never had the chance to, see. His live record­ings and videos just astound -  a jazz / techno / punk / funk col­li­sion that defies descrip­tion here but pulls all those ghosts ¹ — Hen­drix, Coltrane, Cage, Kraftwerk, Clin­ton and Heard — together. With fel­low French­men Scan X and Ben­jamin Rip­pert, he did just that last evening.

Incred­i­ble.

Ahh… bug­ger it…here’s Acid Eif­fel again:

I saw Nina live once and it wasn’t a happy night, as she wasn’t in a good state. Some­times I wish I’d been born twenty years earlier.

A fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­men­tary from 1969, from Peter Rodis.

I arrived back in Bali last week rather laden down with lug­gage. I’d man­aged to exceed my weight limit quite sub­stan­tially both in check-in and carry-on. The woman at the Malaysian Air­lines counter at Auck­land Air­port looked at my exces­sively heavy bag, paused and then smil­ingly said, it’s not a very full flight, you’ll be fine.

The next hur­dle was the jour­ney through the immi­gra­tion area and past those ladies in their red frocks and funny hats who insist on weigh­ing your carry-on, and writ­ing down offend­ers’ names on a sheet. I guess you go into a data­base and may end up as a ser­ial over-7kg offender, and ones name passed on to the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, or its Welling­ton equivalent.

From expe­ri­ence, there are reli­able ways to slip excess (we are always way above that dreaded 7kg…our bag along is almost 5kg..toss in a copy of The NZ Her­ald and a tooth­brush and you are stuffed) weight past these peo­ple but even apply­ing those sneaky fixes, I was wor­ried that my main carry on was going to be a problem.

For­tu­nately as I tried to merge into a much larger group of Japan­ese tourists some­body caused a ker­fuf­fle else­where (one too many tubes of tooth­paste or some other affront to the War on Ter­ror) and I was able to use the dis­trac­tion to rush past.

Of course once past the carry-on Nazis, carry –on is not a problem…nobody else in the world beyond Auck­land gives a toss and you won’t find your carry-on weighed again.

Yep, as said, we always push the weight bound­aries and Brigid has been seen extract­ing large steel cook­ing pots and print­ers from a bag at check-in to keep them happy.

This time, how­ever, it wasn’t com­put­ers (although I had two laptops…in my carry-on) or kitchen hard­ware, or glass­ware that offended, but sim­ple round plas­tic laser-read audio discs…CDs.

I’m happy enough with my dig­i­tal bits and pieces but wean­ing myself from the phys­i­cal for­mat is hard. If I’d had the space there would have been sev­eral thou­sand bits of black plas­tic in there as well.

I’d had to put my CDs (a wall of them no less, but you get that I guess) into stor­age as we moved out of our NZ stu­dio space and felt dri­ven, nay obsessed, to go through them one by one. I ended up with some 200 I felt I could no longer live with­out, and looked long­ingly at these. I knew my 20kgs wouldn’t stretch quite this far. So I edited again, and then I edited again…into must-take, must-take if-there-is-any-room and, finally into next-time.

And so it was I ended up with a large red suit­case with six shirts, a few socks, a book or three, and a mass of com­pact discs.

I stag­gered across three bor­ders with this and had night­mares about burst bags. I also looked at the Indone­sian cus­toms forms. Whilst the kids are absolutely on to it here, the gen­er­a­tion before and those that write many of these bits of paper and the reg­u­la­tions that they attempt to enforce, seem to be in a no-mans land circa 1988. So, the form asks whether I have any records…no I don’t. And any laser discs? Good god…now that’s a for­mat liv­ing some­where in DCC and 8 track hell. So, no I don’t…and I hope that the tech­nol­ogy that peruses all bags arriv­ing in Bali hasn’t led to a big white chalk X on my bag. The guys at cus­toms, hands out wait­ing, love those.

But no, no chalk, and as with Auck­land, some­one called out, dis­tract­ing the guy, as I rushed past the green desk and I tossed my form at him. They always seem bemused that I don’t smoke..what male doesn’t smoke, or at least try and smug­gle cig­a­rettes. It’s a point of much bemuse­ment here in Bali….

Hence I man­aged to get almost 100 bits of my musi­cal past to Sanur.

It’s funny how you crave these things when you don’t have access to them. There are things here I prob­a­bly will only play once or twice, but at leaset can now if I do want to. Not that its enough, but I do have my Nuggets box, and my Joy Divi­sion box (which I’ll likely not play but at least I can look at it), and my var­i­ous impen­e­tra­ble live Miles Davis albums from the early sev­en­ties, which I can lis­ten to for­ever but no-one else gets..they’re not friend friendly; and my much loved Dr. Ali­man­tado album; a Carl Craig set that I lis­tened to over and over for at least a year; an LKJ anthol­ogy; Joey Jay’s fab old school Tro­jan selec­tion; Coltrane’s Cres­cent; the Andy Weather­all Fab­ric mix; a killer dou­ble Fat­back and god knows how many more.

I was like a kid in a lolly shop..touching, look­ing, shuffling..all that…

And play­ing too of course. I played the Miles things sev­eral times until Isabella opined that I had shock­ing taste in music, and had likely lost touch. I sat and thought about the gen­er­a­tion gap for a moment or two and they decided, firstly, to scoff at her, and then, think­ing bet­ter of it, let it go and delved into the rather good Ricardo Vil­lalo­bos Fab­ric 36 mix which in its min­i­mal, stut­ter­ing and almost, dare I say it, world music-ish way, is maybe my album of the year..this week any­way. Not, of course that I’ve heard them all, but in my year. And then there is the Nomum­bah album, Love Moves, which a cur­rent day­time repeat, and is very much that lovely thing that we used to call deep house in those slightly messy Cal­i­bre 98 days, the sort of thing labels like the once great Guid­ance used to toss out with such ease. Warm, a lit­tle bit slight, moody and quite cosy.

Maybe that’s my album of the year right now, since it’s on as I type.

It’s all about the now anyway.