TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2001.

1. SPIRITUALIZED -- LET IT COME DOWN. Jason Pierce is one of the finest musical geniuses of our lifetime. Deal with it.

2. LABRADFORD -- FIXED:CONTEXT. The band retreated from their shimmery, orchestral trademarks, headed into the studio with Steve Albini, and emerged with an album so full of lingering, tantalizing empty space that it was practically agoraphobic. Everything moves in slow motion, as the album passes by in some of the most lethargically forever thirty-seven minutes you'll ever hear. A brooding, meloncholy gem.

3. MOGWAI -- ROCK ACTION. Not as intense as their live shows but every bit as epic. "Young Team" had more fury, "CODY" had more conviction, but "Rock Action" carries more emotional weight. If they can put it all together on the same record, you can't help but feel that Mogwai, one day, could make the greatest album of all time.

4. DEADBEAT -- PRIMORDIA. Rumbling basslines and swampy (ahem) effects quake throughout this expansive masterpiece. The influences loom large (i.e. Chain Reaction) but this is darker and nastier than just about any predecessor. And it's painfully minimal in the best possible way.

5. DRUGSTORE -- SONGS FOR THE JETSET. Drugstore, who hadn't been heard from in years, returned from their brief brush with B-list stardom and got back to basics with a folky, lo-fi, understated gem that reminded you why anyone had cared about them in the first place. The album likely sold fewer copies than Mick Jaggers latest solo effort and will unfortunately be forgotten, if it hasn't been already.

6. A SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA AND TRA LA LA BAND -- BORN INTO TROUBLE AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD. At first, the expansion of ASMZ from a trio to a collective seemed to blanket the serenity that had been their trademark. Upon further listening, more turned out to be less. That is, they use more instuments to play fewer notes, with incredibly effective results.

7. NEW ORDER -- GET READY. Say what? The years best pop album was made by New Order? As infectious as anything they've ever done, "Get Ready" is "Brotherhood" squared and forces the dredging of the phrase "dance-rock" from the cuss words of yesteryear. Who cares, New Order invented the damned thing anyhow.

8. ARAB STRAP -- THE RED THREAD. The years' most distinctive Verve release. It may ramble (beautifully) in its weakest moments, but when its on, it invokes pangs of contempt, disgust, lust and longing, all at the same time, and often with reference to the same person.

9. PULP -- WE LOVE LIFE. The impossible has happened. Five years ago, who would have guessed that Pulp would be making some of the most challenging music in pop? This album, like its predecessor, will take months to fully digest. What makes the world go round? Sex, class struggle, fame, and now nature.

10. MARKUS GUENTNER -- IN MOLL. A fine extension of the "Regensburg ep". Gas-like beats crop up in spurts, but mainly this is beatless, serene, twinkling ambient music of the highest order. A grower, to be sure.

When I finish putting together my list of the year's top albums (weekend-ish), I'll have some explaining to do.

So I might as well cut to the chase and start explaining right now.

For someone who hums and haws about techno as much as I do, two albums in the Top 10 might seem a bit scant. Considering the time and money I spend on techno music, a mere 20% of the year's best albums would indicate that I'm either wasting my effort, or there just aren't many great techno albums out there.

I blame it all on the vinyl. Maybe it is true that there haven't been many great techno albums this year. But there's been a load of great techno. The best of it was released on vinyl. So, in past years, the solid techno stomp of Planetary Assault Systems or K-Hand's transcendent "Detroit-History" may have been top 10 shoo-ins. But when most of the stuff I buy comes in the form of ridiculously killer twenty minute assaults from labels like Kennziffer, then my standards sway significantly toward the direction of impossibly high quality. Take the best twenty minutes of Michael Burkat or Green Velvet, and it fares magnificently next to any vinyl release I've heard. Such quality is difficult to sustain over an entire album.

Perhaps it's no surprise that those Top 10 albums are both by artists who I first discovered through their vinyl releases.

TOP 10 GIGS OF THE YEAR.

1. Mogwai/Bardo Pond, Phoenix Concert Theatre, May 27. My ears are still ringing. Loudest gig ever, and a damned fine emotional rollercoaster.

2. Arab Strap, Lee's Palace, April 13. I walked out of the venue longing for love. I didn't find it.

3. Philippe Cam, SAT (Montreal), June 1. The triumphant peak of Montreal's MUTEK experience, and also the most danceable (despite the absence of beats).

4. Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Opera House, September 27. This gig said more to me about what Sept. 11 was about than the last two months of CNN put together.

5. Spiritualized, Kool Haus, October 29. Once they hit their stride, it was breathtaking. Thinking about those versions of "Let It Flow" and "Don't Just Do Something" still gives me goosebumps.

6. Low, Lee's Palace, February 12. The quietest gig ever. A beguiling way to get lost in simple songs for an evening.

7. Mitchell Akiyama/Polmo Polpo, Now lounge, November 25. Akiyama's set was stripped-down minimal bliss, and Polmo Polpo played for more than 20 minutes!

8. Depeche Mode, Molson Amphitheatre, June 16. Is there any such thing as a bad DM gig? Proof positive that their post-1990 output deserves just as much acclaim as their pre-1990 output, regardless of what the retro-copyist fans wearing faded blue jeans were thinking.

9. Do Make Say Think, Ted's Wrecking Yard (RIP), September 16. Getting DMST out of church and into a proper cramped venue where they could blast the doors open made all the difference in the world.

10. Autechre, Opera House, May 9. The gigging equivalent of those challenges on Survivor where they have to stand on a log for eight hours. If that doesn't sound like your idea of fun, then obviously you weren't there. Oh wait, maybe you were.

What makes "Let It Come Down" different from previous Spiritualized albums is that the lyrics actually matter. That's not to say that Jason's lyric writing has improved. It means "Let It Come Down" is the first Spiritualized record that you can proudly sing along with.

After two straight years packed with more sparkling jewels than a DeBoers warehouse, this year seems a bit flat with regard to brilliant albums. There's been no shortage of *good* stuff, but where is the *great* stuff?

I am at a loss to explain why there have been an unusually large number of Verve releases this year. I first used the term "Verve release" to justify the inclusion of Drugstore's "White Magic for Lovers" in my 1998 top ten. The term is named after Wigan's finest disbanded prog-rockers, (The) Verve, who produced a few inconsistent albums, but when they were on, they were ON.

"Verve release", def.: an album characterized by a wide disparity between the strongest and weakest material, in which the strong material represents the clear majority of the total album and is strong to the point of near-godliness, whereas the (minority) weaker material evokes relative indifference.

I have often used two-thirds as my typical "clear majority". For two-thirds of "Urban Hymns", Verve showed why they were one of the top three or four bands in the world. But with songs such as "One Day" and "Catching the Butterfly", they were mortal.

Verve releases are typically not great albums. "White Magic For Lovers" is a good album, but both of Drugstore's other albums are better. Depeche Mode's "Ultra" is one of their best albums, but it is also a Verve release, as is this year's "Exciter", not to mention 1993's "Songs of Faith and Devotion". Before that, they did much better with the uniformly great "Violator" and "Music for the Masses".

Slowdive's "Just for a Day" is a fine album, but its best material doesn't even touch the best material on the follow-up, "Souvlaki". The latter is the greatest Verve release of all time. Thus, Slowdive are a rare exception -- a band whose best work was not only an outstanding album, but also a Verve release. Remember, an important mark of a Verve release is the disparity: "40 Days", "Alison" and "Here She Comes" just cream "Melon Yellow" and "Sing".

As I was saying, 2001 has been chock full of Verve releases. Perhaps the best of the lot is Arab Strap's "The Red Thread". As a prelude, I should mention that ordinarily, the disparity of the material and the track ordering have no clear correlation. With "The Red Thread", things begin relatively unmemorably, then gain considerable momentum leading through "The Devil-Tips". Then, about two minutes into "The Long Sea", over an aching guitar riff, Aidan Moffat pants the classic line "23 years of foreplay led up to this", and that precise moment signals the passage of this album into fifth gear, and the remainder is nothing short of the bee's knees.

New Order's "Get Ready" contains some awesome songs, but much like "Republic", they are mainly packed near the beginning, with the quality slipping noticably by albums' end.

Stereolab's newest, "Sound Dust", is far from their best work. However, a long and seemingly lost prophecy of theirs came unfortunately true this year. 1992's "Lo-Fi" ep is Stereolab's most criminally ignored release, probably because none of the material featured there ever appeared on any of the lauded "Switched On" compilations. But it's one of the best releases they've ever had -- it expands on the formula of their early singles and their debut album "Peng" by chugging out four of the loudest, nastiest, and catchiest two-chord monsters that they ever recorded.

On the track "Laisser Faire", Laetitia sings the following:

It will come to us as a shock/but we're letting it happen/people with their carelessness/goverments with their laisser faire/ ... the world is becoming more right-wing/ ... I can feel it more and more/within ten years we'll have a war

The 'Lab have made thinly-veiled comments about US imperialism in other lyrics (i.e. "Wow and Flutter") but this one made a far stronger declaration, taking precise aim to the point of making an actual prediction (and it's a far better tune as well). In 1997, somebody asked Laetitia during a web chat if she still believed there'd be a war in five years. At the time, the threat of world peace breaking out seemed a greater possibility than at any other time in my lifetime, and in my opinion, pop's most famous Marxist avoided giving a direct answer.

And now, this.

The year in review will start today!

DON'T CALL THEM COMEBACKS. One of the best things about New Order's latest, "Get Ready", or almost any New Order album for that matter, is how much it sounds like New Order. This New Order album kicks off with the single "Crystal", which begins with a delayed intro of keyboards and soaring female vocals. Then, the beat kicks in, and within ten seconds of that happening, you hear the completely unmistakeable guitar playing which can only belong in a New Order song. In this way, New Order are a lot like Aphex Twin, in the sense that anyone who's ever been a fan of New Order can hear a new New Order song and know before now that it's a new New Order song, even if they've never heard the song, because it's part of the magic of New Order that everything they do sounds so much like New Order, which isn't to say that all New Orders' stuff sounds the same, because that's certainly not true, since New Order have been one of the most fearlessly original bands in the post-punk era. New Order's are just one of those artists that you can immediately recognize as themselves (and Barney from New Order's aforementioned guitar playing just screams "New Order!", it's as distinctive to the New Order mystique as Hooky from New Order's more vaunted bass playing). The funny thing is how New Order sound more like New Order as they age. For instance, "Technique", their most original album, kicks off with "Fine Time", which at the time, sounded nothing like New Order, until you got a few minutes into it, at which time Hooky's New Order bass playing came to the forefront and you could breathe a sigh of relief and say "Ahh, now THIS sounds like New Order" and then further relax as that unmistakeable New Order guitar playing breaks open the second track, "All the Way". On the other hand, when New Order's 1993 album "Republic" (which was looking to be the last New Order album, much more so than all the other times when it looked like there wouldn't be any more New Order albums) was released, I'd also recently bought New Order's 1983 album "Power, Corruption, and Lies", and I would play tricks on friends by playing "Leave Me Alone" and those in the know would immediately ask "Is this New Order?", and I would say "Yes, it is New Order, but it's from 1983" and they'd say, "No way, it sounds exactly like New Order", and I knew that they meant it sounded so much like 1993 New Order, even though it was 1983 New Order. Similarly, with "Get Ready", New Order have made "Brotherhood Part II" just like New Order made "Power, Corruption and Lies Part II" with "Republic". That is, the latter two albums displayed New Order's dance-y tendencies embedded those records' rather dour overall mood, while the former two are extremely guitar heavy, collectively comprising New Order's most rocking statements to date.

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The new Curve album, "Gift", can't be considered a comeback record. For one thing, they never really left the music business. In 1994, they announced they'd be taking a "hiatus" and repeatedly stressed that Curve were not breaking up, but basically everyone ignored that and considered the band to be broken up for the next five years. Well gosh, Debbie Smith went off and joined Echobelly, and goodness knows when your guitarist runs off to join a legendarily successful and groundbreaking band like Echobelly then you'd better just call it quits [note: that was sarcasm]. Anyway, if Curve had a comeback album, then it was certainly 1999's "Come Clean", which had them plunging headlong into the electronica boom and making an album laced with thundering neo-industrial beat. In other words, it sounded nothing like the Curve we'd ever known, even though the actual results were patchily successful. At the time, I likened it to Sonic Youth's "A Thousand Leaves". Both bands engaged in new (for them) musical textures, which seemed the result of skimming ideas from the bands that in turn had been influenced by them many years earlier.

"Gift" is a return to Curve's classic sound of 1992-3. It still sounds remarkably contemporary, in no small part due to Garbage, Republica, et al having made careers out of ripping off Curve and helping to preserve their memory in the process. Like other Curve albums, there is some unnevenness in the material, as usual, the high points are truly remarkable. "Perish" may be the best thing they've ever done. And I'm not just saying that because Kevin Shields plays guitar on it.

No really, I'm not.

Stop looking at me like that.

I took a short dip into the waters of Vancouver nightlife last Friday night. Now, I won't insult the people of Vancouver by playing judge and jury over their music scene after being there for only one week, so keep in mind that these are merely observations.

Trying to get into the DJ Krush show at Sonar proved fruitless. When the papers say "doors open at 8 PM", Vancouverites must do the wacky, sensible thing and actually show up on time. By ten, the place was packed and the lineup outside more closely ressembled your average glacier than a horde of young music fans. The art of deciphering the start time of a show from the listings in the papers is a problem akin to finding a cure for the common cold, i.e. nearly impossible due to the hundreds of different varieties of the elusive beasts. The lineup itself was startlingly calm and reserved. In Toronto, people would be trying a thousand different means to skam their way past the security, saying they know anyone from the head bartender to the roadies to the janitors in order to bypass the line. Vancouverites seemed more concerned with what they scored earlier in the day, what they could score once inside, and who they needed to score from once inside.

Afterward, I got to play out a little fantasy of mine. In early 1980's Detroit, house parties (in whatever sense of the phrase) were attended by smartly-dressed, upper-middle class kids. The music was smart and energetic, the crowds extremely lively, the DJ's willing to drop any wild record at any time. Everyone was mad for it but the overall impression (at least to me, and it's my fantasy so I can think what I want and mix fact with wishful thinking without malice) was that of culture and class.

I was at such a club last Friday. Its name has been wiped clean through subsequent alcohol scrubbings, but no matter. It was in a beautiful, spacious second floor loft overlooking the pleasant red-brick streets of Gastown, massive video screens blasting kaleidoscopic cartoons flanked the DJ, who was clearly having the time of his life, and the crowd was fashionably dressed, and very clearly in a mood to dance, drink, socialize and immerse themselves wholeheartedly in this scene.

One more thing. THE YEAR IS 2001. Everybody in there -- the staff, the DJ, the customers -- looked desperate. They desperately believed that they were in at the genesis of something groundbreaking. Their body language desperately intoned that in the room in which we stood, a unique, vibrant rump-shaking happening was taking place, and our collective responsibility as club-goers was to spread the fledgeling gospel, bring more converts back to this haven of budding revolution before it got too massive and watered down to fully appreciate, all while wearing an "I'm so cool to be here, so cool that I won't even show it on my face" look. And it was all so pathetic because everything that I described did exist -- TWENTY GODDAMNED YEARS AGO. You can play dressup all year long but it can't change the fact that the genie's been out of the bottle for decades, and you can't pretend that he just popped out of that bottle just because you didn't notice him until years later.

Learn. Listen to some house music. When you solely rely on the DJ to shape your tastes, you end up in a loft dancing your tits off to dreadfully soulless plastic house music with nary a memorable pounding beat in sight. Use your ears. A sax solo does not soul music make. Think before you dance.

#2. My Bloody Valentine -- Loveless. MBV changed rock. They heard the Mary Chain and ran with the ball. They took some guitars, and made them sound fuzzed up, jacked up, and totally f***ed up. They married this to one of the best collection of sweet and dirty pop songs of the postpunk era, all while distorting these beautiful melodies behind a hazy fog of twisted frequencies and subdued erotic vocal meanderings.

Three years later, they made "Loveless".

"Loveless" doesn't rock. It doesn't even have real drums on it. Nothing on it, save perhaps "What You Want" and "When You Sleep", rocks out with the wantonness of "When You Wake (You're Still In A Dream)" or "Suisfine". Nothing purrs and simultaneously unsettles like "Isn't Anything"'s "No More Sorry" or "All I Need". Instead, "Loveless" is a collection of lurchings and mid-tempo strolls set to an army of effects that try their best to blanket the lack of strong fuzz-pop scorchers. Compared to the more visceral rush of its predecessor, it is mechanical, submerged, and its overall emotional rush muffled behind a screen of cotton balls. As an engineering marvel, it is top notch. As a pop album, it is not. Just because everyone else went dance in 1990 doesn't excuse "Soon", their "contribution" to the new ecstacy culture. There are fine tunes here, such as "Blown a Wish" and "Sometimes", but their "more is more" approach swamps these simple paeans of love beneath their sound experiments, without ever letting the melody breathe. Listen to "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" or "Lose My Breath" to prove to yourself that a little acoustic clarity doesn't diminish the hazy atmospherics. Noise may be everything, but it's not the only thing.

#1. Orbital -- Insides. Sometime in 1994, Orbital realized they needed to stop making groundbreaking techno and start making groundbreaking music. "Snivilisation", their concept piece extraordinare, made you think about how society breeds confusion and it even made you dance. And for those without much of a brain, it offered radical new sounds -- the dizzying jungle of "Are We Here?", the futuristic lounge jazz of "Forever", the clanging minimalism of "Philosophy By Numbers". There were a million new things combined in a million new ways.

"Insides" combined a million old things in a million new ways. It contained an even stronger political agenda, but it was set to a soundtrack of old and easily found sounds. Everyone and their dog had gone drum n bass by this time, and the light, shuffling breakbeats of "The Girl With the Sun In Her Head" and "PETROL" were Orbital's perfunctory take on such rhythms. Now that DnB is but a shadow of its former stature, those tracks have aged disconcertingly rapidly. Orbital's more straightahead, banging techno updates of their old material during their recent tour seem to find them scrambling to cover up this fact.

The sequencing of the melodies, the way they skirt and dart all around the mix like cats chasing mice (particularly during the concluding half of "Out There Somewhere") are pure late 70's Kraftwerk and Georgio Moroder. Yes, they did the same thing on "Snivilisation"'s "Kein Trink Vasser", but that was but one song, not an entire album. The homogenous feel to the album's "instrumentation" may make for a smooth ride, but as a statement of electronic sound innovation, it is passable at best.

Orbital wanted to make a proper album. They succeeded.

#3. Spiritualized -- Pure Phase. The twelfth track, "Pure Phase" is the embodiment of this album. A whirring, humming, single note (G) fades back and forth, from speaker to speaker, for six and a half minutes. Jason Pierce likened it to the sound of a violin section tuning up -- a single, pure, sustained note to relax and lose yourself in. If indeed you find yourself lost in such a listening experience, then "Pure Phase" may be for you.

Otherwise, this album can try your patience like no other. "Pure Phase", that everlasting G, never really goes away, as it is featured at various levels of the mix throughout most of the album. Thus, the entire album is in a single key, casting a blanket of sameness over all of the material. The usual concept of "songs", with verses, bridges and choruses, is flippantly tossed aside. With a few exceptions ("These Blues", "Lay Back in the Sun" are two of them) everything is a sequence of instrumental one note mantras (e.g. "Electric Mainline), and semi-stoned warbling over wibbly guitar feedback (e.g. "Slide Song") is a tracks . Jason seems to disappear over long, vocal-less sections of the album, vanishing into a swath of droning, purring notes, while the listener is left behind wondering and waiting if the droning will ever stop and if something will actually happen on this album. "Spread Your Wings" is a fine example of the kind of orchestral arrangements that would be further perfected on the next two Spiritualized albums, but it is the sole example of it's kind here, in the presence of "balladry" such as "Take Good Care of It", which contains one sustained chord, Jason's voice buried beneath a mile of gauze, and very little else.

It's not difficult to understand why Spiritualized had to wait until "Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating In Space" to make their critical and commercial breakthrough.

#4. Pulp -- His N Hers. This album was a perfect artifact for its times. It was blatantly pop, and unashamedly British. It was about the often seedy, always fascinating sex and relationships in and around Sheffield. The lyrical sentiments -- or lack thereof -- were clearly the work of a band that could afford to take the piss, talk about inconsequential day to day interpersonal dalliances, without any pretentions of being important musical artists with a responsibility to convey relevant sociopolitical messages. That all changed in 1995, as Pulp became the voice of the underappreciated underclasses. The production became bolder and more assured, which was reflective of the toughening of the message being conveyed (and also due to a different producer). But hearing "Acrylic Afternoons" today, it carries a whiff of irrelevance. Who cares about carrying on an affair with a married woman underneath her dining room table when there are real, pertinent issues to deal with in life? The production does help -- Ed Buller's glossy, extrovertly showbiz production style comes off as an indie version of a 50's musical set in the glitteball 70's. And the glossiness connotes plasticity and insincerity.

The illicit tales can be irresistable, and Jarvis Cocker is undoubtedly a gifted storyteller. But as a musical statement, "His N Hers" -- a wonton depiction of a fantasy world removed far from reality, set to backing tracks produced so slick you could play ice hockey off them -- is as outdated a means of communication as Blur's Cockney yuppie keener characters (from the same time period). Of course, "Parklife" sounds daft and goofy today.

#6. Drugstore -- Drugstore. After a couple of years in nondescript indie obscurity, this album sprung forth out of nowhere before the the bands redescended into indie obscurity, pausing briefly a couple of years later to feed off of Thom Yorke's rising star. The sound of "Drugstore" ages well, but how could it not when they've chosen such classic and innovative bands to pilfer from (Jesus and Mary Chain, Velvets, etc.)? They tread unsteady ground between the fury of the former and the urban folk of the latter's 3rd record. In the first instance, they often threaten to lash out on tracks like "Superglider" and "Gravity", but end up restraining themselves for unknown reasons. In the second instance, some of their more sublime moments ("Speaker 12" being the prime example) are plundered courtesy of sudden squalls of guitar. In between trying to figure out what volume they want to play at, they are quite successful at picking one level and sticking with it, such as the poignant "Accelerate" and the delicious power chorded grind of "Fader".

Isabel Monteiro's sultry voice is the album's main drawing card, but her lyrics often delve into semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness ("Nectarine") and pedantic lust and longing ("Starcrossed", "If"). And since Joan Osborne wrote such peurile and benign musings on the man upstairs, it has sabotaged any likelihood that anyone can listen to ruminations on G-d within a pop song ("Favourite Sinner" without either cracking up or hitting the mute button.

#7. Woob -- Woob. Em:t, the label on which this album appears, was a series of hit-and-miss releases. You'd have dull astract ambient hip-hop and whale noises one minute, and warm, organic mellowness emerging from the rainforest muck the next. This is in abundance with "Woob", sometimes spanning those extremes within the very same song. The 32-minute opener, "On Earth", takes forever to get going, but once it does, it's a storming dub bohemoth. Then it returns to ambient wibbling for a second dose of forever. It's long for the sake of being long, which is never a good thing.

"Odonna" is Woob at his baffling best, that is, when he wants you to freak out, not mellow out. It's confortable beginnings do little to forshadow it bizarre endings, with it's blaring keyboard washes ressembling a zombie choir singing beside your bed. Then he ruins the unsettling mood by going 1993 hippie ambient, with the soft tribal drums and faraway chanting of "Wuub". Later, he scares the crap out of everyone within earshot with the horror film samples and cold emptiness of "Strange Air", before descending into the disturbing, but quite anticlimatic, subterranean bowels of "Emperor".

The high points are undeniable, but the overall unevenness and all too often lapses into ambient cliche tends to muddle the flow of the record.

#8. The Orb -- The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.

As far as 110 minute debut albums go, this is about the best you can hope to find. In North America, it was edited down to 70 minutes, in other words, short enough to fit onto one CD or cassette. Ordinarily, a true fan's response to the truncation process would be several sustained cries of "Sacriledge", but ironically, the editors got many things right. They chose brisk, dancefloor-friendly versions of "Perpetual Dawn" and "Star 6 & 7 8 9". In particular, the latter is a ultra-E-friendly, sunny chiming number that readily invokes the twinkling qualities implied by its title. On the double CD, "Perpetual Dawn" open the second disk with a thud in following up the pristine bliss of "Spanish Castles in Space", the first disc's closer. As with the 2CD's version of "Star", its grumbling dub loops endlessly meander, displaying some of the directionlessness that made the benign "Orbus Terrarum" such a disappointment.

In fact, the entire second CD comes off as dull compared to its companion. The first CD is marvelous because it doesn't try too hard to be ambient. "Little Fluffy Clouds" is a delicious slice of offbeat humour that is every bit as refreshing then as it was back then, "Gaia" is just downright spooky, "Supernova" gets starkly funky (just listen for all the wonderful dead space in the mix -- the track is a blueprint on how find bliss while shaking rump without cluttering up the mix). The second disc screams "chill out ... downtempo grooves ... NOW". "Outlands" isn't half the dub-hop floor-filler that it thinks it is, and "Into the Fourth Dimension" isn't one-quarter the space travel ravers come-down that IT thinks it is. Finally, they made a huge blunder by choosing the "live in-studio" version of "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld", which is the worst of the 5824 versions of that song (the 21 minute version from their first Peel Session is the best I've heard -- and having been recorded during in December 1989, makes it the last classic track of the 1980's, IMO). Burn CD1 from a friend and save your time and money for tracking down all their Peel Sessions for the one of finest collections of crust-free, dub-free ambient stasis you'll ever hear.

I love the University of Toronto Department of Music's Annual Sale -- where else can you get nine records and three books for a measly $18.50?

For a near crimminal 50 cents, I grabbed the "Trouser Press Guide to '90's Rock", published in 1996. This volume was edited by Ira Robbins, who also is a main contributor (along with a few dozen other journalists). Robbins warns us in the Forward that his essays were meant to be both informative and critical. You can say that again. From what I've read so far, his pieces are far more scathing than any of the other authors. Among his victims are many of my favourite groups and albums.

On one hand, criticism and alternate points of view are extremely constructive. A fan will be upset about a bad review of their favourite band, and they will quickly erase such negativity from their minds immediately after reading it. A music appreciator may get upset, but he or she will store those words in their head for a long time afterward, pausing to reflect on them from time to time and perhaps getting around to questioning whether they contain an element of truth.

On the other hand, no matter how brilliant a piece of music may be, you can always find something to criticise. And criticism for the sake of criticism is a practice that many writers engage in, maybe due to a reluctance that they will gradually become indistinguishable from the common fan should they allow themselves to like something too much.

To demonstrate both points, over the next several days, I will make concerted criticisms of my ten favourite albums of the 1990's. Actually, there will only be seven, since in the case of bands with multiple entries, I will choose the higher ranking record.

After getting over the initial shock of hearing the news that Sam the Record Man had filed for bankruptcy, my thoughts turned to more selfish pursuits -- the impending clearance sales. Yes!

I know nothing about how Sam's was run as a business, but as a music store, nobody viewed their downtown superstore in the same way after HMV opened up down the street in 1991. Sam's was basically a big warehouse that happened to sell a lot of good music. The opening of HMV was an event, and the store was a spectacle in itself. It was sleek and high-tech, brilliant blue facades, four floors of music and greyish-silver steel -- it was more like a dance club than a music store, and people went to see it regardless of their interest in music. It's like when a new sports arena opens, such as with SkyDome in 1989, everybody asked everybody else "have you been to SkyDome yet?". It became the newest location that everybody just had to visit, if only to say that they'd stepped foot inside and nothing more.

Competition between the mega-chains drove prices down. I had no complaints. But for years, HMV remained the sexy new store, while Sam's and nearby Sunrise were just big white boxes.

Sam's eventually opened a dance and R&B-oriented second floor, but it never took off. They renovated a couple of times, most notably the front, with it's cramped layout and cash register placement nearly indistinguishable from a supermarket checkout. But the overall look stayed the same. Sunrise eventually smartened up and completely overhauled their interior, with a flashier, more HMV-ish concept in mind. They continued to offer loads of discounted CD's, and their selection improved. Sam's basically stayed the same.

I'm biased, but I came to rely on HMV because they, in my mind, led the way for major chains selling dance music and British import CD's (probably because they are a British company). Ironically, in the last couple of years, Sam's did develop a rather impressive selection of techno, but HMV built theirs up around 1994, a very large head start. Those were Sam's problems in a convenient microcosm. They cited competition from online retailers and local chains as main reasons for their demise. They admitted, really, that they'd been behind the times for quite a while.

Jason Pierce, you scare me. You really do. You are a genius. That is not new, for upon buying the "Electric Mainline" 7" single in 1993 I went home and heard it and loved it so much that I proclaimed Spiritualized to be a band whose susbsequent material was worth buying without the need to listen to it first, which was a trust I put in no other bands except maybe the Orb or Depeche Mode, and even then, the latter have made only one record better than the absolute dreck of your recorded output (relatively speaking of course, for "Laser Guided Melodies" is the bee's knees, and I don't count the second half of "Recurring to be a Spiritualized recording, even though it is for all intents and purposes) but if that's the shoddiest thing you've ever laid your name to, which includes every last note played with Spacemen 3 -- the early, tinny demo versions onward, impressively covering seventeen years of everthing from blistering psychedelia to poignant orchestral blues -- then you've got a career value that'll rank with the New Orders and the Barry Bonds'.

But 1993 genius wasn't enough. The aforementioned greats got better with age. You did too. "Anyway That You Want Me" would have (well, should have) been enough to make you the Soft Cell of 90's British pop. The career of your new band had already been rendered fond with that simple seven minute piece of swoonsome guitar pop with the Hey Jude ending. You became *the* white soul brother. Sure, Spectrum beat you to the punch with "Highs, Lows, and Heavenly Blows" (one of the greatest albums that nobody knows about) but went on to show him, didn't you, and the victors get the sympathy in the history books, and one certainly doesn't see Sonic Boom's name gracing the gossip pages and the pop charts these days, which likely suits him just fine, though. But you got to make the album of the year. Which you did in 1995. And again in 1997. And you've probably done it again in 2001. Do you think you're Stevie Wonder or something? Is there a world full of Paul Simons to serve as placecards to hold peoples' attention while you sit on your ass for years between albums and imbibe exotic narcotics in a depressed daze while contemplating the meanings of life and love? It's not fair. It isn't. You toy with anyone else who dares to release a fine record, knowing that at your very will, coming at approximately eighteen months to the day after you stop feeling sorry for yourself and finally get off the couch and clean yourself off and start work on your next work of unimpeachable genius, you can one-up any ambitious musician by vomiting forth a bevy of suites with more emotional depth and sonic bonkerdom than anyone else could even begin to conceive.

You move me, but I hate you. OK, I don't really hate you but I just can't believe you can be all numb and drugged out and depressed and still do the things you do when the rest of us sober and healthy people struggle to make minimal impact on the world around us. Just keep doing exactly what you've been doing. Sigh.

Heck, everyone else is writing about the Strokes, so I figured I would too. First, we need to get something straight: THERE IS NOTHING ORIGINAL ABOUT THE STROKES, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL.

Well, that's out of the way, so let me add that "Is This It?" is loads of fun, filled with catchy hooks and peppy swagger. Sure, the never-ending trail of one-stringed guitar lines and solos are pure Buzzcocks, but they were a good band too. And there's undeniably nothing shocking or unique about a NYC 'tude, I compared a picture of the Strokes with a picture of Blondie on the back cover of their debut album, and they were nearly identical. Yeah, the Strokes are cuter and younger, but the rugged, ratty clothing, the "I don't give a flying f***" scowls -- indistinguishable. Actually, pictures of the Strokes remind me more of early Suede than anything else. Whereas the Ramones, Blondie, Television et al appeared as if they couldn't be arsed to pose for a picture, the Strokes convey more than a hint of "Who us? Don't hate us cuz we're beautiful"-esque glamour that Brett Anderson was pouting throughout all of 1992.

But hey, fine tunes, strong debut album, catch them while they're hot.

In the last two weeks, both Elastica and Catatonia have split.

Both splits were not too surprising. Both bands were once mega-successes but have suffered career lulls due to disappointing receptions of their most recent albums. Both bands demises were aided by "extra-musical circumstances", but of completely different natures.

I will be clear about this: I do not mourn Elastica one single bit. They were easily the most overrated band of the Britpop era. They had a couple of catchy singles, loads of tuneless filler, and a singer who, thanks to her famous acquaintances (ex-Suede, ex-Damon), was branded with a stardom that vastly outstripped her talent, resulting in her big head for believing she was 1000 times sexier than she really was. Praise was thrust upon them for their very inception, thanks to the timely release of their debut single "Stutter" with the ascent of Suede, who were the hottest property in British rock at the time, and the first Great English Hope of the post-grunge era. They spent forever making their debut, got loads of airplay on both sides of the ocean, and sold bucketloads of records. Then they fell victim to the Stone Roses Syndrome. Infighting, members leaving and being replaced, five years between albums, but most of all, a belief that fame would just happen, with the pieces randomly falling back into place despite the time spent away. In the interim, particularly the last three spectacular years of music fandom, fans were so spoilt for choice that it was easy to find other bands to love, and Elastica's return was smoothly lost in the shuffle.

On the other hand, Catatonia's fall is particularly tragic, because they were on top of the world less than three years ago. They are the 90's version of Frankie Goes to Hollywood -- meteoric rise to prominence after springing forth from near-obscurity, then slipping from biggest band in the UK to gonesville in only a couple of years. People are bound to think that Cerys state of mind fell into psychological turmoil because "she couldn't take the fame" or "the price of stardom is high", but I've never believed that. Stardom doesn't destroy people, people destroy people. Like Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, and a million others, she had a choice. If she didn't want to be in a pop band, if she needed to distance herself from whatever she was becoming, she could have gone home and done something else. She could have quit the music business, taken a few years off, whatever, she didn't have to go out night after night and drink herself into oblivion while hobnobbing at celebrity gatherings. I wouldn't do her the indignity of pretending to understand what she's going through, but it's undeniable that her problems led directly to the demise of Catatonia. They had always consisted of Cerys + nameless blokes in the eyes of most who had heard of them, meaning it was undeniably impossible for them to exist in any fashion with a healthy, vibrant Cerys. For that, and many other things, I really feel for her.

As the only table in my apartment continues to fill up with piles of CD's, I've been taking the time to stop and reflect on this years' amazing releases. It's no surprise that I should do this, because that's "normality" for me, and therefore it provides the perfect escape from the events of last week. What I wrote on September 10 now seems rather eerie, but those words don't disturb me as much as they probably should.

It's somewhat disturbing that Drugstore have this habit of putting the best songs at the end of their albums. "Accelerate" -- maybe the best song of the 1990's, and a B-side to boot! "Everything a Girl Should Have" recalls the delicate moments of their debut, and comes as a welcome bit of stripped down tranquility after the frequent overproductions which slightly marred the tunes that transpired before it. "More Than Friends" is a fragile, quivering lullaby, it's hardly even there, much like the Beatles' "Julia". It was probably written in ten minutes and recorded in a half-assed fashion on one take, how do they do it? How can they succeed like this when the rest of us would kill for five seconds of such genius? Fear them.

The Super Furries "Rings Around the World" has been come under criticism as being an overproduced mess due to the scores of Sony money that were on hand to record it. Do not believe these people. SFA didn't tone down their chaotic tendencies to make room for major label gloss. Their new record sounds just like 1999's "Guerrilla", which is part of the problem, because they've tried write a by-the-numbers sequel to that album, much like Blur did when they followed up "Parklife" with "The Great Escape". They've succeeded in writing some brilliant songs but there's really no progression from the breakneck pacings and unpredictablility of "Guerrilla". On the other hand, "Juxtapozed With U" is the best single they've ever done, and if it's not given strong consideration for the Single of the Year then we'll have to give it the full Donna Summer disco remix treatment and then try again next year.

What's more, two of the best groups of the 90's, Pulp and Spiritualized, will be releasing their first albums in a combined 7.5 years within a few weeks of each other. I need to keep reminding myself to not get too caught up with the old guard.

A couple of weeks ago, a famous R&B star died in a plan crash along with eight other people. You may have heard of her, she was Tricky's first choice to sing lead on his "Broken Homes" single, but she wasn't able to do it so he had to get PJ Harvey instead. Hopefully, enough time has passed to allow people to return to thinking rationally about her career and the manner of her death. With regard to the former, she is experiencing a post-mortem canonization similar to the case of Jeff Buckley. As with Buckley, she was certainly a considerable talent but hardly a top level star. She was nowhere near the level of popularity of Mary J. Blige or Toni Braxton, nowhere near as beautiful as Destiny's Child, and nowhere near as outragious as Li'l Kim, although she seems to have become all of those things since she died.

And her death was not a tragedy. I've been waiting to write this piece for two weeks, waiting to hear facts from the crash investigation. Now that I have, I can declare it to be a preposterously dumb error in judgement by arrogant music industry people. We've learned that the plane had been booked for five passengers, because that was the maximum number it could safely transport. Eight people showed up for boarding. Thus, the plane became "substantially overloaded". Otherwise, it was in perfect mechanical condition before takeoff. Except that the plane itself was not registered to operate commercial charter flights in the Bahamas.

If these findings hold true, then the decision to board the plane was equally stupid and asinine as eight teenagers packing into a stolen five person car and joyriding down the highway. The deaths are sad, very very sad, but people who die as a result of their own piss-poor judgement are not worthy of the word "tragedy" to describe their actions. For example, JFK Jr.'s death was not a tragedy either, no matter how many tribute issues are devoted to it by People magazine. John John was a spoiled arrogant playboy who had absolutely no business flying that plane under those conditions, with a foot injury and with his limited flying experience. His passengers are less to blame, but no more so than people who willingly get into a car with an obviously drunk driver. Tragedies should describe instances in which people die through absolutely no fault of their own, just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Eight people dying and hundreds more sick in Walkerton, Ontario as the result of E.coli poisoning because the local officials didn't even know what bacteria were -- that's a tragedy. Fourteen people getting blown up in downtown Jerusalem because they dared to have pizza for lunch -- that's a tragedy. A bunch of music industry types piling themselves and their hordes of luggage into a tiny unregistered plane is not a tragedy, it's just a dumb mistake on the part of many, many people. Let's not candy coat it, let's say what really happened. People educate their children to recognize dangerous situations. Such education is always simple and direct: don't use drugs, don't carry guns, don't drink and drive, and if you know somebody who is, stop and tell somebody about it. Unfortunately, people still die by these methods, but if there is a positive side, sometimes it takes a persons' death to make people realise how wrong they were when they died. But only if they truly understand why that person died in the first place. RIP.

Thoughts on the MTV Music Awards (from what I saw):

Michael Jackson must be a genius after all because appearing onstage with NSYNC was the single greatest career move he could have possibly made. To anyone under 20 who doesn't remember the '80's, MJ is a plastic-faced freak who sleeps with animals and little boys (actually, it's the same for everyone over 20, but at least the over 20's will still remember "Thriller" as well). He hasn't released an album in six years, the guy is forgotten, he has NO cred. All of a sudden, you've got the self-proclaimed "King of Pop" in the same sightlines at the present-day Kings of "Pop", and even a two-year old could see that connection, and it smacks positive of a bona fide musical "event". Even I marked out for it, and I hate all of them.

What's with all the obvious screw-ups? The power outage right before U2's performance, Jamie Fox introducing Jay-Z instead of Moby and Gwen Stefani. Should we be expecting these proceedural unpredictabilities instead of the increasingly predictable unpredictablility of the show as a whole? Then again, the most predictable thing was the steady stream of presenters who were using their air time as a vehicle for pimping their upcoming albums, boosting the shows' running time from "too long" to "insanely f***ing long" in the process.

Britney wore next to nothing and put on a performance that inspired descriptions such as "alluring" to "unrationally extravegant prog-pop". Come on -- snakes? dry ice? jungle and wild animal motif? Maybe ELO should have asked her to tour with them this fall, THAT would have rescued the tour for sure and they could have split on the production costs. Incidentally, there have now been two ELO reunion tours cancelled due to embarrassingly low ticket sales. One, maybe, but TWO -- is that some sort of record? I actually feel a bit sorry for them, but then again, ELO kinda suck, so the feeling is fleeting.

Finally, allow me to re-stir the Britney vs Christina pot. You just KNOW that Christina had to be FUMING throughout the show because Britney had the prestigious final performing slot of the evening, along with the incessant hyping of said performance that comes with such an "honour", not to mention how she was on camera every ten seconds because of the 392 awards won by NSYNC. Christina had to feel like the #1 Queen Bitch when she got to on stage at the bitter end for winning Video of the Year. Oh, and then she got to act like it because she thanked Patti Labelle for letting them cover "Lady Marmalade", when in fact she should have thanked All Saints, who gave Christina + friends the template for that success by covering the same song in the exact same manner only three years ago. Luckily, her fans have short memories, which of course bodes ironic for the future longevity of her career.

Congratulations on receiving one of Barry's mix tapes. This tape contains 90 minutes of music but with proper storage, care and handling, will provide a lifetime of listening enjoyment.

Instructions: insert tape into any standard tape player. Play tape. Enjoy.

Caution: this tape may have been intended for use in specific conditions. It may be best enjoyed at night, in a car, with headphones, or played very loudly. Such information would appear with the liner notes. For maximum listening effect, reading the liner notes before playing the tape is strongly suggested.

Warning: the songs on the tape are non-negotiable. Exchanges are impossible. Requests will not be honoured. There was a plan involved in making this tape. Therefore, changes in the playlist and/or song order are not feasible without completely altering the mood and pacing of the tape.

Background: Barry has extensive experience in the art of mix tape recording, taping from a variety of formats and sources for over a dozen years. Therefore, he has spent nearly half of his life in this business! Each tape is personally compiled and manufactured by Barry himself. However, the music industry has evolved over the years, and Barry's style has evolved with it. He honed his craft by making tapes for himself, hour after hour in his bedroom. These tapes compiled the newest alternative and cutting-edge dance hits of the day, interspersed with classic songs for added variety and historical weight. In the early to mid 1990's, he shifted his focus toward producing tapes for others. Early mix tapes featured a minimum of artists, often with large sections of their albums. As Barry's music collections grew rapidly, there was a pressing need to feature more and more artists. Eventually, each artist was limited to one or two songs per tape, with very few exceptions. In order to fit in so many differing styles of music, the tracklistings were meticulously planned in advance. With only 45 minutes per side to work with, this ensured that songs were not cut off and more importantly, the songs flowed readily into each other. This was Barry's preferred method of working for many years, and many feel that his best work was done during that time period.

However, the era of detailed planning ended around 1998. Perhaps as a reaction to the rigidity of those working conditions, Barry shifted to a freer, more improvisational style. This shift occurred over many months. From this time onward, Barry's tapes were recorded with almost no premeditation. He would begin with a rudimentary idea, i.e. decide on the first song and the last, but nothing else; or start soft and build to something loud; and let instinct and emotion fill in the details. Like with a virtuoso who grows to understand his instrument better after years and years of performing, Barry had developed a prodigious familiarity with his prestigious music collection which no longer required his fatherly grooming as part of the mixing process. In the last year, he has taken this idea even further by experimenting with continuous mixes of ambient and techno music, although these are still in the development stage. Which brings us to the present: therefore, the tape which you hold in your hands was born out of one, improvised take. There are no overdubs. It is truly one of a kind.

Motivations: since you are in possession of this mix tape, you must be a very special person indeed. Each tape is personalized and made "ready to order". In other words, it was made specifically for YOU. Some examples include, but are not limited to, the following. You may be someone who adores and appreciates music similar to Barry's tastes, and the tape is designed to introduce you to music that you ordinarily would not get the chance to hear, or music that you would get the chance to hear but have not yet had the opportunity to do so. You may be a music lover with tastes different from Barry, and this tape will introduce you to music which is unfamiliar, so that Barry can communicate a little bit of what his musical tastes are all about. If you are female, there is a chance that you and Barry are romantically involved, if this is the case, the tape is likely a token of Barry's affection (a gift similar to the flowers or chocolates you may be accustomed to receiving from normal guys) and should be rewarded with a hug and a kiss at the very least. But in all cases, the tape will contain no music that you currently have, except for the rare case in which a particular song is needed to fulfill an exact purpose.

Suggestions: as previously mentioned, this tape is best heard under the recommended conditions. For example, if the liner notes recommend that the tape should be heard at high volume, it is strongly suggested that you do so. Low volume will still be pleasing to the ear, but like substituting margarine for butter, it will be missing an easily detectable nuance. In such a case, if high volume listening conditions are not available, you may want to hold off listening to the tape until such conditions do become available.

Enjoy your tape, and have a wonderful day (unless the tape is meant to be sad, in which case, have a miserable day. If you are unsure as to the proper course of action, consult the liner notes, or Barry himself). Again, enjoy! (-: (or not!) )-:

I'm reading a book about psychedelic music called "Kaleidescope Eyes" by Jim DeRogatis (who also wrote "Let it Blurt", an excellent biography of critic Lester Bangs). I've seen a couple of other books about psychedelia which focus on it's 1965-1969 heyday. DeRogatis takes a far more ambitious approach and covers it from the 60's right through to the '90's, from the Beatles and Stones through pretentious 70's prog like Yes and ELP, right up to shoegazing and ambient in the '90's. Even though conventional music history states that psychedelia died with the '60's, DeRogatis knows better. It didn't die, a scene, a culture can't just die, it morphs into something else and continues to evolve. After enough time has passed, the music has changed so much that its roots are not easily visible, but they are there. DeRogatis attempts to follow these roots, which is a difficult job to be sure, but this is the most accurate way to follow a "scene". That is the strongest point he can make: we shouldn't stand for books that cover a short period of musical history and make that period out as the "be all and end all", without adressing the manner in which the story continued. This is more of a problem than many people realise. Take disco, for instance. Most people think that disco was hot for a few years in the '70's and then it died abruptly, as DJ's stopped playing it, records ceased to be pressed, and Solid Gold was on TV one week and off the next, all because of Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey park or some other ridiculous reason. Disco didn't die, it slipped quietly from the mainstream, while wimp-rock balladry and English New Romanticism pushed up to the forefront. But you can't listen to early Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet and claim that there isn't a disco influence. Disco itself went underground, into the clubs in Europe, New York and Chicago, and re-emerged most famously as house, and without house there'd be no Eiffel 65 or remixes of Jennifer Lopez' latest single on your radio.

Punk suffered from the same malady, as people assumed it vanished from the face of the earth once the Sex Pistols broke up or between the Clash's "London Calling" and "Combat Rock". Once grunge hit big, there was a mass wake-up call to grunge's punk roots, as the world at large became aware of the existence of Sonic Youth and Husker Du. And thus, punk's story has been more truthfully told. But to suggest that psychedelia died, vanished in '69, or disco in '79 (or Britpop in '96, or Rave in '92, or shoegazing in '93, or ....) is pure myth, is misleading, and it is factually wrong.

To hell with mood-altering medications. Prozac -- whatever. The new in-drug is : Senor Coconut. Today, my own crappy mood was lifted by the good Senor and his Kraftwerk covers. It wasn't immediate, however. Moods can't be lifted at the snapping of one's fingers, just like you can't expect a frown to turn upside down at the sight of a clown and a sock puppet. Especially with me, because I consider myself almost immune to anything too outwardly happy or cheesy. So I almost turned off the CD when "Showroom Dummies" started up, for I assumed myself to be in no mood for any novelties. But there I was, thirty minutes later, grooving around the room to "Tour de France". Even now, I can barely believe that I fell for this. It's like hearing the punchline to a joke you've heard a dozen times, but being surprised at the end and laughing anyway. Senor Coconut vastly improved my day. Be happy!!

Last Friday, I went to hear Derrick May spin at the Mockingbird. Many others, it seemed, went to SEE Derrick May spin at the Mockingbird. Last time I went to hear May spin, it was Fukhouse (RIP) at Industry (RIP) and the place was packed to the tits and everyone was dancing like a maniac. This time, there were maybe 100 in attendance at any one point, everyone was constantly wandering between the main room and the lounge, and one might have thought that May was the Mona Lisa from the way that people were staring, gawking and generally thrilled to be in his presence. I can't fault the idol worship, because after all, it's DERRICK F'N MAY. And I can't fault people for not consistently packing the dancefloor, because everyone is free to enjoy music in whatever fashion they prefer, it's not written anywhere that when the DJ plays, the masses are obligated to dance like pill popping teenage girls. Also, May played a challenging set, filled with everything from beatless Philippe Cam to old school L'il Louis to slamming hard techno-funk. As an aside, the biggest rise from the crowd seemed to come from the cheery house tracks he dropped early on which instilled a momentary fear in me that the only way he'd get a rise out of the tiny crowd would be to stoke the Richard Simmons at Gay Pride Day reflex, but that fear quickly passed once the music got rougher and faster and the dancefloor cleared. But I got the feeling that coming to the Mockingbird that night was treated like a spectator sport, with the music he spun being second nature to the man himself. It was an evening in a never-been-there netherzone between the stereotypical faceless DJ while ravers get off their heads, and a fan-club admiration society in which the star DJ shows up, pops their summer mix tape into the stereo, does the obligatory meet and greet, and heads for the waiting limo nary an hour later.

I sauntered over to HMV and found myself at a listening booth breezing through Travis' new "The Invisible Band". There was a promotional poster above the listening booth which referred to the albums' "unique instrumentation and genius production", which caused me to have a good laugh (to myself) coupled with a sudden urge to run home and listen to MBV's "Loveless", which is the first name in albums that actually deserve such an accolade. I'm assuming that since the above phrase was followed by "(Nigel Godrich of Radiohead and Beck fame)" then one was meant to follow a misguided reasoning along the lines of $Radiohead, Beck = musical gods = genius production$. That still wouldn't excuse the claim that two guitars, bass and drums is any more unique than the latest release from the Popstars TV show in your favourite country. Which reminds me, I saw a promo which referred to the new release by Canada's Sugar Jones as "R&B flavoured pop stylings", or perhaps it was "pop flavoured R&B stylings" but in fact it really doesn't make a damn difference what it said because if you even have to ASK or mull for ONE SINGLE SECOND over what it's going to sound like, then please do emerge from the cave that you've been in since grunge died its painful death and turn on "(Today's) (Pop) Hit (s)(z) (__) FM" (it doesn't matter which one, because they're all the same) and listen semi-intently for about 30 minutes, and it doesn't matter what time of day you tune in, because it'll all sound the same no matter what. Jesus! British rock is turning into manufactured pop -- it all sounds the same! No surprises!

Now I like Travis, "The Man Who" is a fine piece of mellow guitar pop songcraft. Same goes for "The Invisible Band", but not quite as catchy as its predecessor (hey, that's pretty much what EVERY review has said, which I guess is what happens when your new record isn't inventive and sounds just like your last record -- everyone's heard it all before, and everyone hears it in the same way). But you or me or anyone who can be shown how to push a button on a mixing desk could have produced "The Invisible Band". You just have to fiddle with the controls until the instruments sound identical to "The Man Who" and you're done. There are NO creative decisions to be made, no wondering if the guitars should sound more trebly, or distorted, or more like a trumpet, just a simple sonic photocopy (auralcopy?) of "The Man Who". Sort of like when a band walks into a studio and their name is "(one or more monosyllabic words) (a number)" -- all you need to do is get your hands on Green Day's "Dookie", and PRESTO, merely twiddle the knobs until you hear the same thing, no decisions necessary, no mess, no fuss.

I just saw the 1970 movie "Performance", in which Mick Jagger stars as an aging rock star, back in the day when a 30-year old was considered to be an aging rock star. And forgive me if I'm years behind the ball on this one, but with his pouty look, long black hair, and dark eye makeup, Brian Molko of Placebo looks EXACTLY like Mick does in this movie. The ressemblance is so close that it's scary. As for the movie itself, "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" trod similar ground and was far more cleverly written, and the accents were just as difficult to understand.

Follow-ups:

The third album will settle the following question once and for all: are Drugstore one of the most talented bands in Britain, or was their debut album merely one of the biggest flukes in the history of recorded music?? (From July 27, 2000)

I recently bought the bullet and paid $36.99 (-$24.99 using a free CD from my HMV club card) for Drugstore's newest, "Songs for the Jetset". And after listening to it ... of course, the choice is never as black and white like I overdramatised last July. The opening double-shot of "Baby Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Song For the Lonely" are as good as anything they've done, the kind of stuff that I'd call "seminal" if I didn't hate that word and couldn't describe it better as a tenderized "I Know I Could". The overproduction that marred the last album is absent, with a bare, semi-acoustic lo-fi folky mood taking it's place. Which, in a way, presents a new problem: despite solid tunes top-to-bottom, the album has a homogeneous feel with little of the noise blasts that made "Drugstore" so engaging. But looking at the set lists from their February/March UK tour, I'm salivating all over this keyboard -- PLEASE, somebody give them a North American record deal so they can tour here.

If Travis and Coldplay are to survive long-term, then they MUST quit sounding less like 1995 Radiohead and more like something, anything, else. However, advance press regarding the new Travis album do not suggest that this is the case. (January 4, 2001)

That didn't stop me from buying "The Man Who" when I woke up one morning and realised that "Driftwood" is an absolutely brilliant song. After failing to find a used copy, I finally reneged and paid for it at HMV, mere hours before the release of the next Travis album (somehow that seemed to matter at the time). And sure enough, the new album is widely purported to sound exactly like "The Man Who", except with less hummable tunes, but those opinions will surely change because it always takes a while to get into the tunes on a pop album, nobody thought TMW was a classic at the time, but a couple of million sales and humungous group singalongs at outdoor festivals have their ways of tickling the insides.

And when I saw the cover of the new Jessica Simpson album, looking out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was Britney. If Jessica wants anyone to believe that she's the anti-Britney, i.e. the chaste and tame Christian girl next door alternative to Britney's now famous Lolita image, then she might want to ditch the provocative poses and see-through tops.

(posted before, but written after, the June 3 entry). Yesterday, we discovered that the house fans are driving MUTEK. Oh, the techno fans are there, dancing quietly or sitting in a corner talking about software, but it's the house fans that are raising the roof on the dance floor. So what, you say? It's a techno festival, so techno remains the soul of the machine, but if the house music fans are the the most vocal and the most visible, then MUTEK's reputation lies in its ties to the house music community. I know that the house v. techno battle is a matter of life and death for some people (i.e. the purists) but I am not one of them. I like house. I like it a lot. So even if I'm unconcerned about this issue on a personal aesthetic basis, on a philosophical basis, I've got a bit of a problem with a techno festival relying on house music fans to bring home the bacon.

In the spirit of happy hour, I make myself comfortable, and get to work writing about Saturday night in a notebook. SAT's not packed yet, but it poured rain in Montreal during the afternoon, so give people some time. Sure enough, the toddlers were there, dancing to Jeremy P. Caulfield by afternoon's end. But first, it's a set of vicious techno by Jacob Fairley. But the best was still to come, in the form of Matt and Mark Thibedeau rocking the place into oblivion with a spectacular set of their deep, cinematic and yet proudly minimal house. I find myself feeling quite sorry for them, because the cramped front portion of SAT doesn't leave much space for dancing, and regardless, the happy hour setting isn't conducive to it. If they had played in the main room during any of the night events, there's little doubt in my mind that they would have stolen this festival by inducing hyper-Philippe Cam levels of madness among the house-hungry denizens. Following up, Jeremy P. Caulfield's performance is just beats to me, with his final track, a funk monster with impromptu rude vocals by an audience member, standing out as by far the most memorable moment.

Later on, I expected a more subdued evening, assuming that the Monday morning early risers would open up some space on the dancefloor. Instead, the opposite was true: after an hour of blippy dub which could have easily passed as an all-Pole set, SAT is jam packed tighter than at any other time of the weekend. The place is hot (literally) with the escalating body heat of hundreds of people, affixed in anticipation of Herbert's live performance, and hot (figuratively) for the exact same reason. Performing with a live vocalist and pianist, the house v. techno dilemma flies straight out the window and impales the cashier at the donut shop across the street, because Matthew Herbert proves, as if he had to, that he is the most soulful white man on the planet. His beats are filled with pops, whirs and fidgety fingertapping rhythms (a fine bit of continuity from the music that played before his set) and it's not until the third song that he goes truly nuts on the sampler, breaking bottles and CDs, smashing and tapping microphones, all of which is lumped in to the rich stew of soul, techno-geekery and gorgeous jazz piano solos. Not to mention the sheer physical image of him flailing away, clacking and banging for the sake of live performance, which is why Herbert is the one and only true action star of house. Even after two encores, the place is eating him up with a spoon to the point of scraping the gooey bits from the bottom of the saucepan with said spoon and then licking the metal spotless. After that, I feel for Dimbiman, because the crowd is buzzing over Herbert's masterful set and it takes a good twenty minutes before people really start getting into his show, me included. That is, once the collective masses have returned from the bar from their grandiose beer break, his persistent attack of hard house and electronic mayhem eventually wins people over. And the place is getting funky in more ways than one, with the influx of fresh blood, scores of people who weren't interested, or didn't bother to show up for any of MUTEK's other nights, jacked up on the highs of their chosen poison and the music of their heroes.

I didn't much mind, mainly because I was having a good time, but partly because I knew that Thomas Brinkmann would take the stage, and with one whiff of his grinding neo-industrial onslaught, the housies would run for cover and their Basement Jaxx CDs, and techno would win the day once and for all. Sure enough, Brinkmann comes on and unleashes ten minutes of two turntables (with cut vinyl for extra-abrasive noise) and the most brutal slab of jagged noise this side of Imminent Starvation, all leading into ... two hours of pounding tech-house, which drives the masses into a two hour fit of Philippe Cam levels of madness.

Although MUTEK was billed as the meeting of blipping and clicking, there was actually very little of that, particularly when compared to last year's lineup. Ironically, one of the only instances of that style (during the 3+ days that I attended) was in the hour long lead-in to Herbert's performance. It may still say "music, sound and new technologies", but those simple definitions have undoubtedly changed given this drastic shift in focus. On one hand, MUTEK is expanding its horizons, which, as a design for life or as a cliche, is rarely a bad thing. On the other hand, those strict boundaries were allowed to melt, morphing MUTEK from a highly unique and concentrated gathering of like-minded artists and fans into something more closely resembling a party stacked with a big name lineup that could have been found in Toronto, or LA, or _____. Big fish, small pond, etc. I fear the day when the ravers crowd out the devoted techno fans who have actually gone through the trouble of closely following the scene.

Reading over the above, how elitist I must appear. Just my bad self acting up. My good self, I must assure you, welcomes diversity, welcomes any event that could carry the variation in musical style and groundbreaking impact of 1993's "See The Lights" tour, featuring Moby, Orbital, Aphex Twin and Vapourspace (in the long ago days before the film soundtracks and TV commercials), and will happily show you his music collection to prove it. My good self, too worn out to dance after Thomas Brinkmann's marathon, but still with the yen for those repetitive beats, remained for a portion of Ricardo Villalobos' DJ set, hunched on a seat near a speaker behind the stage. On my way out to call it a night, I ran into Dirk Leyers, AKA the Finely Coifed One from Closer Musik. I stopped to chat with him about their upcoming album and their preference of old Ataris over the newest digital software.

I couldn't resist asking him if he saw Closer Musik more as a pop group or a techno group. They'd never really thought about it, he said, there was no master plan, and they were just doing what they enjoyed doing. He said that they'd played club gigs in Germany in front of techno audiences and they, like the Montreal crowd here on Saturday night, seemed really into their music. In a very deliberate way, these were the very things I hoped he'd say. The only restriction on the "genre" of pop music is that people like it. The last few days have been about pop music. It all comes down to pop music.

I stroll into SAT at 5:30, half an hour into Mitchell Akiyama's set and the place is packed to the tits. Deciding not to fight my way to the bar, I fight my way to the back and am fortunate enough to score a seat amongst the sea of incessant chatter. Like the Montreal Jazz Festival or any free event in Toronto, free music has a way of making fans of people. The mish-mash of personalities -- as varied in age and appearance as those from last Thursday at Ex-Centris -- enjoy their Happy Hour drinks as Mitchell Akiyama squiggles on. Conversation continues around the music. I read "Let it Blurt", a biography of rock critic Lester Bangs, as my contribution to the cocktail hour vibe.

These types of events make MUTEK difficult to gauge. Who comes to techno shows? If it's free, everyone does. But I doubt that the six year olds in attendance can save enough allowance from making their bed each day to save up for the newest Kompakt releases. So who comes to MUTEK? And when they come, do they know, or care, that Tomas Jirku scrapped his well known deep dub, Pole-ish approach in favour of a more slamming sound?

Coincidentally, Tomas Jirku is a major reason for me being here, which is certainly unbeknown to him. Once day last October, I made one of my regular visits to Penguin Music, where he was working, and he was playing a wonderful, Detroit-meets-Basic Channel techno concoction. At that point, I'd considered Kompakt releases to be a hit-and-miss series of highly abstract, irregular rhythms, sometimes lacking in melody and focus (I was somewhat confused and mixed up between Kompakt releases and those of its more experimental offshoot, Profan. So some of the qualities I attributed, in my mind at least, whether accurate or not, were attributed to Profan). I loved what Tomas was playing and bought it on the spot. That record was Jonas Bering's marvelous "Bienfait" and was easily the best thing I'd heard from the Kompakt family, which changed my perception of the label to the point that I bought and appreciated more of their work, and thus, the Kompakt label showcase (which includes Jonas Bering) was a major drawing point in getting me out to Montreal for MUTEK. Got all that? And my MUTEK peers -- what are their reasons for being here?

There's certainly the ambient drawing card, as I re-arrive at SAT at 9 PM sharp to find about fifty people already in attendance, many of them lying supine, bathing in lush ambient records. After some time, Olaf Dettinger's set begins. I used to always talk about the distinction between "warm" and "cold" ambient. Essentially, the labels are self-explanatory, with the former representing comfortable (including dubby) moodscapes and the latter focusing on isolationist ventures. My error was in pigeonholing all ambient into exclusively one category or the other. Dettinger's set drives home the exception. It's a beautiful blanket of sound, the sound of the night sky if it were filled with ten times as many twinkling stars (hence, the warmth) but also rich in lower harmonics and humming bass vibrations. And the volume seems to increase throughout, until it's downright intimidating, as the occasional stutter-stop rhythmic subtleties emerge to further throw off the body's sense of self-equilibrium (hence, the cold). And at 40 minutes, these feelings are all to fleeting, as in the meantime, the room continues to fill up and yet nobody budges an inch.

As expected, the place comes alive for Jonas Bering, who must have been getting the deep rub from his label brethren since the release of "Bienfait", because he bombards SAT with a set of funky, abstract techno (the "a" word is overused, but it's one I find difficult to avoid when it completely encapsulates so much of Kompakt's work) that bears little resemblance to said album or his recent 12-inches. In front of me, two French guys are standing and holding their drinks. One is wearing a turtleneck. They're trying to sway to the music as immeasurably as possible -- to project an image that they are too cool for all this music. Behind me, there are two women in formal wear. One of them sports a pearl necklace (Pearls Girl) and one wears a black dress that wears like a sash strapped over her shoulder (Black Sash Chick). They're dancing like pre-pubescent teenagers. To my right, there's a white guy with a huge afro (Fro Boy). He's not dancing. During the beatless moments between songs, people almost immediately stop dancing but when the beat begin again there's a hysteresis effect, as we the collective somehow take a good minute or two to get back into the beat. It's as if everyone's dancing out of instinct with their minds in some faraway place, and are relieved to have a breather when they hear the beats stop, but they have to look around and make sure it's not too unhip to recommence dancing. Whoa, did I fall asleep during Dettinger's set and wake up back in Toronto?

With that in mind, Tobias Thomas is a good four tracks into his set before he wins the crowd over. Which can't be blamed on him, as he treats us to a grade A selection of Cologne cuts, cavernously deep and yet equally lush. And he's a closet Britpopper, with a mop top haircut and a very campy Blumfield t-shirt (a French pop group, are they). Best yet, he dances during every second of his time behind the decks, which is something I really like to see because I do the same when I spin. Of at least I would dance if I was any good at spinning and could spend more time dancing and less time cueing records.

However, the nagging question that crawls in my mind during TT's performance is the question of why this showcase is headlined with Closer Musik -- a relatively new combo with but one 12-inch to their credit -- instead of one of the more established artists. But I was soon to discover that it was all in good sense and sensibility, because ladies and germs, Closer Musik are the WHOLE F'N SHOW.

They take to the stage looking like a couple of Germans (although one of them is Chilean, I know, but just go with me on this one). Polite Germans. Polite Germans wearing dark slacks and white collared shirts. Please insert snarky Kraftwerk comment here. With movie star haircuts. One of them has very short brownish hair and a round, babyish face (Babyface). The second, who bears a striking resemblance to Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter circa 1977, has longer black hair with well-styled curly bangs, and hence is the Finely Coifed One. They break into simple electropop, which is probably all they *can* play from the antiquated look of their equipment. I look closer -- they've got a pair of 1987 Ataris and a sampler that looks like it was assembled on an episode of "Junkyard Wars". Are we having a Pac-man contest later on? Yow -- the Finely Coifed One is gyrating and styling like he thinks he's Tom Jones! And he's got a microphone!! And he's going to sing!!!

"Dah, dah, dah" he signs, aspiring to be the second coming of Hasselhoff. And people are going WILD for this stuff! Babyface and the FCO occasionally look at each other and smile. This is the most fey performance in the history of techno, which is sort of like calling something the most grueling performance in the history of croquet, or canasta, or dominoes. Does techno really need an injection of fey? I don't know.

"Whassup, whassup, whassup" sings the FCO, although it more closely resembles a cross between a croon and a whisper. Babyface often tinkers with the ancient computers. The songs are so basic, it's unclear what is keeping him so busy, but still, he tinkers. Later on, Babyface picks up ... an electric guitar! Everyone pops like balloons at the mere sight of the guitar. And to think, in 1994 it was a major controversy when Underworld had the gall to use a guitar in their live shows. They even used them to trigger samples. Some people were calling for their heads on silver platters because of this. And now Closer Musik bust out the six string and get huge cheers. The FCO warbles something about the stars while Babyface picks out the occasional melody over the simple backbeat and four chord accompaniment. I overhear Fro Boy saying that the point of all this is to "do the things that you're not supposed to do". How true, but somehow, however inconceivable it may seem, Closer Musik and their dinky, catchy melodies are fun-tastically brilliant. This may all go to pot and fall into a casualty ditch as did with Rephlex records' similar experimentations with electro-retro-futurism, but for now, this crowd adores them and they attempt an encore. Predictably, ironically and unfortunately, something goes awry with their aging sampler which prevents it from happening.

Tobias Thomas returns to the decks and revives the room (which had lost some hot air due to the downtime from CM's technical difficulties) with deep, but ordinary house music. Frighteningly, despite being presented with the most unremarkable music of the festival, it goes over better than a stripper on a battleship. Philippe Cam levels of insanity ensue, with the crowd going nuts during every breakdown. Pearls Girl and Black Sash Chick are having copious amounts of fun. I spot them embracing and kissing -- wa-hey, they're lesbians, COOL! But is it really true that the attendees of MUTEK have hearts that beat for house, while techno stands out only as their cheap, outer facade? Minimalism, bah! Breakdowns are the antithesis of minimalism. After 20 minutes, I'm about ready to give up on them and head out, but the tempos speed up, the music gets harsher, and with Dave Clarke's "Red 2", the transition is complete. We're in a hard techno zone. People still love it, although those pops are considerably quieter. So does anyone truly care about the techno, or is MUTEK just the best dance party happening this weekend? "The whole of MUTEK's programme can be seen as a long trajectory over five days" says the flyer, with its long words and purple prose digital smooth culture performance compositional organic textures abstract collage floaty pretty warm blissful rippling ambiance blah blah blah. Sure, until next weekend's rave, that is.

After a couple of hours of frenetic dancing, I depart, personally satisfied but disillusioned in the slightest.

Traum was the featured label last night. I have not been actively following their label's activities, which now seems to have been a mistake. I arrived at SAT a little after ten, and there were already twice as many people there as at any point the previous night. The whole place was lounging, standing and listening intently to Process. The sound at SAT is not the greatest, as I had noticed the previous night, such is the reality of square shaped buildings with high ceilings. But after seeing Sigur Ros, and now Process, I am beginning to think that performing in a cavern helps them sound better. Process plays music that drips from the walls, much like being in a dark, damp underground cavern, with each droplet of water that hits the ground smacking you in the face in the form of a blip or a bass rumble. He even added beats to this stew by set's end, and right on cue, people danced to this wierd stuff. Wierd was in the air at the start of the night. I sampled several locations in the room, but the first was the stoner/chatmonger corner. Generally, people were transfixed on this creepy, atmospheric techno, and the room's scenery: black and concrete, with many people sitting on the floor, bore out the mood of the music.

Gustavo Lamas then shifted gears completely, drowning the room in a lush synthesized warmth. Beats, subtle yet driving, propel most of his set. I had never heard of Lamos, but he's obviously heard of one of my favourites: Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. Gas and Chain Reaction dubbiness will never fail to get a big thumbs up from me, particularly when those baselines scream Fluxion all over. He may walk on soil that has already been tread, but Lamas stomped a mudhole in it. But it's nothing compared to the stomping and general insanity that resulted the moment Philippe Cam took the stage. I guess the bald, aging Frenchman is a sage to the young, dance-stoked Quebecois. The whole place danced like bastards to M. Cam's approach to house, which consists of everything you need for house except the 4/4 beat and the hi-hat. Sequenced electronic loops blanket the mix, and the whole thing was cruelly minimal, in a Vainqueur sort of way, so frankly, it was nothing short of brilliant. And people danced like chickens with their heads cut off. Did I mention that there was rarely a beat to speak of? Amazing.

The countryman vibe continued with Montreal's own Akufen as your headliner. He started by roping everyone into a false sense of security, Process-style, with the stuck-in-a-cave atmospherics, which soon exploded into furious (but minimal, of course) techno beats with various electronic mayhem spread on top. Oh yes, everyone danced like a bastard again. I did too, except during the time I laid down to rest my aching back. I just basked in the harshness of it all, although my back did feel better. Afterward, this trend of steadily increasing volume continued. By the time Akufen took the stage, the walls seemed as if they were shaking. Then, at 2:30 AM, label boss Triple R took to the decks to engage the room in some truly righteous stripped-down, deep techno, inasmuch that the loudest sound in the room seemed not to be the music, but the furious vibrations of the speaker cones. The half of us that stayed on to witness this cleansing continued to dance like the bastards that we are.

Five hours can really fly by quickly, you know.

I don't feel that I've been part of a musical "scene" for a long time now, a good five years, likely (and this hasn't changed, that's not where this is going). The problem is twofold. One, with time, any scene gets to be so damn big that either I don't have the time to follow everything in it, or I find myself not liking an appreciable fraction of the music within it. Two, my range of musical interests has grown so much over the years that I no longer have the desire to concentrate most of my energies on one particular type of music. Thus, it's all boiled down to two things: good music and bad music. Techno, for one, is so complicated, with everyone in the business running record label(s), each one for a different set of ideas, DJs coming to town all the time, a CRIPPLING number of new releases every week, etc. You see, many techno artists have home built studios, thus, they can crank out new tracks on their own time without having to suck major label corporate dick to get company money behind $100 000 of studio time and subsequent album promotion (not that there's anything wrong with that). I have very little will for keeping up with all these activities, I'm much happier walking into a store, grabbing a bunch of interesting looking vinyl, listening to it, and buying my favourites.

Under the canopy of "stuff I like" are the musics presented at MUTEK, in Montreal, which is where I am right now. Minimal, bleeps, blips, "clicks and cuts" (ugh), whatever it is, I like it. I have no yen to get in touch with the newest digital trends or label launches. I just want to spend a weekend in a city listening to wicked techno. That's enough for me.

Yesterday, I visited Ex-Centris, home to the first two nights of MUTEK, to pick up tickets that I had reserved (for this coming weekend). At the risk of coming across as elitist, I expected MUTEK to draw a more "intelligent" breed of fan compared to the powder-sucking go-go dancers that Toronto City Council seems to worry about. Well, I got what I expected, all right. Ex-Centris looks like a Greek temple decorated by the hand of European sleekness. Huge columns flank the outside. Upon entering, you immediately notice the purple glow of the neon lights in the darkened cocktail lounge to the right. I walk up to a tellers face just inside the entrance. That's right, just her face, on a round video screen on an otherwise black, opaque wall. The head says that I can pick up my tickets from the media table inside.

Inside, the scene resembles a crowd gathered for a university lecture or an art exhibit. Young bohemian types mix with White Men in Suits in a large softly-lit atrium. An impressive scene in the sense that it shatters all preconceptions about "rave culture" by practically outclassing the upper class. I don't even know if everyone was there for the same purpose (probably not) but the fact that techno fans seamlessly were mingling in a setting more reminiscent of a museum opening than a rave was damn cool. The whole scene was 100 times more swank than I would have expected. I pick up my ticket and slide to the adjacent table to grab a MUTEK t-shirt and CD (featuring tracks from the artist performing here). A patron and the woman behind the counter were talking techno (en francais). He was inquiring about the other CDs on sale and what they sounded like. The talk turns to Goem, and I try and help out by sharing my knowledge of Goem's music (en anglais, on ne veut pas m'ecouter, quand je parle francais, j'ai oublie presque tout la langue).

Later that night, I went to the Society of Arts and Technology building (SAT) for a nightcap. I'd visited SAT earlier in the day, and again, I was struck by the whole museum aspect of it. Temporary bars were set up in the corners, while a mass of electronics, belonging to that day's Happy Hour performers, occupied a side of the room. The electronics table was set up in front of about a dozen, small, round cocktail tables, with trendily dressed twenty-somethings sitting at them making polite conversation. Toward the rear of the building, partially obscured by a big black curtain, was a larger area, presumably the dance floor for the main performances. Grey floors, black curtains, not much else -- a minimalist indoor cafe.

Oh yes, the music. Mike Shannon worked a seamless two-hour set on the decks, jumping constantly among his three decks, fingers always busy, something like Spiderman, if he had spun house and techno. For part of his set, I sat at a candle-lit cocktail table and read, in one of the digital culture mags that they were giving away, about how digital video is causing a stir in Hollywood. Oddly similar to the analog v. digital, vinyl v. CD argument. Of course, I also danced, but being a bit tired from walking around Montreal all day, spent some time sitting on one of the many person-sized, shin-level cushioned platforms that were scattered throughout the room. I particularly enjoyed sitting behind the performing platform, away from much of the crowd, where I could relax and watch the performers work either in the flesh or on one of the two giant video screens on either side of the stage. Then, there was a live performance by Chilean duo Ric y Martin. Their stripped-down locked grooves were doing it for me, although I'm not sure I could say the same about most of the rest in attendance (at least for those were dancing, who seemed to be searching for a few more quirks and breaks in the rhythms). This may or may not bode well for the rest of the festival, particularly the Kompakt showcase.

Nothing sensational last night, but certainly solid. Bring on the label showcases.

I don't review gigs on these pages (although I do plan to make an exception for next weekend's MUTEK festival in Montreal) but Mogwai and Bardo Pond are touring together. If you haven't bought a ticket yet, drop everything and do so NOW. They played here last night and it may be the best show I've ever seen. Bardo Pond's set alone was the best gig of the year. They were loud and fucking INTENSE. If I'd gone home then, I'd have had a smile on my face for the rest of the week. I was already deaf by the time Mogwai took the stage. Their set easily smoked the three previous times I'd seen them. The new songs were in full effect, and were played at 100 000 times the volume that they appear on the record (why they didn't record it like that, who knows). You've never heard such melodious noise.

Yesterday, I was flipping through the latest issue of Maxim, and I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, but I digress. I'm a sucker for "Top ___ of ____" lists, so I was curious to see the contents of their "1001 Sexist Women Ever" list. Of course, the existence (or proposal of the existence) of such a list is beyond preposterous. A real Top ___ Ever list should based on statistical methods (not flippant opinions) at least in some sense. Stated differently, trends should develop over time, with certain items settling into some sort of local minimum or maximum of the chart. A list of the greatest albums ever shouldn't, as of this week, contain seven REM records in its top ten just because they played a free show here in Toronto last week. Just because everyone's got a warm and fuzzy feeling in their bellies over REM doesn't mean they deserve to ride their hot streak into a Best of All Time List. Similarly, any list appearing in Maxim involving female celebrities is going to give precedence to the latest piece of hot T&A, with the odd Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe thrown in to make it look like someone actually did a bit of research. In twelve months, half the women in the top 50, say, wouldn't be there (if they did the list again).

A THOUSAND women. I couldn't even name two hundred women, let alone a thousand sexy ones. Half of them are easily replaceable in a year's time by newer, fresher T&A willing to bare their nipples through a see-through top in Maxim's glossy pages. Just think about this. What does it all mean? That's right, sexy women are EVERYWHERE. New ones are becoming pseudo-celebrities by the day. I can go out to any club on any night in the city of Toronto and see five gorgeous women that are sexier than the average woman on Maxim's list. I recalled Roger Ebert's comment on the Spice Girls, which stated, in essence, that they are no more beautiful than any random five young girls standing in line at a Dunkin Donuts. Ebert completely missed the point -- his dislike of the Spiceworld movie aside -- because the Spice Girls never claimed to be the sexiest women on the planet. But it's funny how superstardom leads to female celebrities being scrutinized as such. For every man or woman who pants over Ali Landry or Gisele Bunschen, there's an equal number who resent them because "they're not THAT pretty". So was the Spice Girls success just a massive fluke? Could any idiot have randomly picked five girls off the street and made them into superstars?

Would Titanic have been the same without Kate Winslett? If Kate Beckinsdale had played the part, would it have mattered?

Pick your favourite rock band. Suppose some random guy had played the bass instead of whoever they actually had. Would the band REALLY have turned out much different?

I was at the Autechre show yesterday. Techno shows aren't what they used to be. In the old days, you had to show up to a rave at 2 AM to see Orbital or Autechre. Now their concerts get announced in mainstream papers for mainstream venues. Thus, people get fooled into thinking that the music is now mainstream. In the old days, it would be me and a bunch of neon bracelet-wearing powder-sniffers watching Autechre. Now you get goths and Queen Street pop kids and old people wearing collared shirts. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more: the gig, or the looks of confusion and bewilderment from this motley crue as Autechre played an hours' worth of stuttering beats and electronic noise. People had no idea what to do and there were all these horrified faces with "but we can't dance to this, waaahhh" looks. Many people simply left.

I have received more feedback about my anti-Radiohead diatribes than anything else that I have written. I don't mind being known as "the guy who hates Radiohead", but I would prefer to be known for bands that I have championed. You take what you can get, but I wouldn't mind the title of "the guy who wouldn't leave My Bloody Valentine well enough alone" being bestowed upon me. Plus, I don't actually HATE Radiohead, as I explained on 04/01/01.

Nonetheless, I am not the most, um, appropriate candidate for previewing their new album "Amnesiac". And yet, that's what the world is about to get, because I was "privileged" to be treated to about six tracks from the advance copy at Sam's at Yonge&Dundas. With the exception of a Satan-awful jazz track, "Amnesiac" is extremely listenable. As we all know, "Kid A" is meandering electronic junk. "Amnesiac" features the same liberal electronic use, but it throbs and glows like the most ambient bits of Broadcast and Stereolab. It clicks and purrs not unlike Pole or Autechre would. Thom Yorke's voice is far back in the mix, and it's barely noticeable, drifting above each track like an afterthought. The key difference is that rather than using electronics for electronics sake, they're using the technology for creating a bristling, glowing, wall of noise.

Still, for an almost identical feel, with superior haunting melody to boot, I'd recommend Yo La Tengo's "Danelectro e.p." any day of the week.