Xmas Eve in Berlin was spent in the best way a Lonely Jew On Xmas knew how -- at the Tresor club. After nine weeks in the city over two separate visits, I finally made it. And it was more than worth it.

The top floor isn't too different than your typical club, with extended bar, video screen circling the dancefloor, and tech-house pumping along to keep the crowd moving. But it's the cellar which made me feel like I was in a legendary establishment. The walls were lined with thin, rusty, dingy shelves -- remnants of safety deposit boxes left over from the buildings' tenure as a bank. Further in this vein are the metal gates which divide the cellar into three section. Obviously they used to be for security purposes, now it gives the place a feel of a dark dungeon. The dancefloor is dark, and the flashing lights and regular dousings of dry ice smoke render it difficult to see eight feet in front of your face most of the time. And the music ... hard, pounding, minimal techno (I'd be proud to spin any of it) and a dense, sweaty crowd going 10 times more mental than in the upstairs room. In Toronto (and in most other cities) the situation would be the exact opposite. And somehow, these reactions transcended the sexes, as there were hotter girls downstairs than upstairs. All hail Berlin, the city where the cover for a mythical club on a holiday sets you back a mere three Euros (!) and techno stirs the emotions in such passionate fashion.

After all night at the Tresor, I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and set to the task of packing up and drinking the remainder of the beer in my fridge. And I watched MTV Germany's top videos of 2003. Somehow, I followed pop music more closely on this trip than I have in many years, including listening to pop radio regularly for the first time since 1988. In retrospect, it makes sense. MTV Germany was the only non-news station which broadcast shows in English. My increasing disenchantment with the Brit music papers gives me a craving for trash and gossip that I just don't get from the music I normally listen to. Plus, I'd become thoroughly bored of the 50 CD's I'd brought with me by the fourth week, hadn't had time to shop for anything new and therefore was desperately in need of something new to hear.

I watched the final 30 videos uninterrupted:
30. JT -- Cry Me a River. What more can be said? I was surprised it wasn't higher.
29. Blu Cantrell f. Sean Paul -- Breathe. Putting SP in
your video seems to guarantee a hit with an underwhelming song these days.
28. Nena -- Leicht Turm (Light Tower). Yes, it's THAT Nena. And she looks all right twenty years on, having apparently settled into a niche that Dido fills for the English-speaking world.
27. Snoop + Pharrell -- Beautiful. The song took months to hook me, but it did eventually. At the start of his career, I hated Snoop for his pompousness and arrogance. Now I love the guy to death. He's one of the ten coolest people in the world.
26. Linkin Park -- Somewhere I Belong. Whatever.
25. Xtina -- Fighter. Does this remind anyone else of an "Adore"-era Smashing Pumpkins video? That's not a compliment, by the way.
24. Busta f. Mariah Carey -- I Know What You Want. Busta was virtually unrecognizable the first time I heard this (with his singing). Mariah's career resurgence hasn't happened yet, but it's unevitable. Trust me.
23. Jay-Z f. Beyonce -- '03 Bonnie and Clyde. Beyonce's only purpose here is as the eye-candy sidekick, but that IS the subject of the song and I'm certainly not complaining.
22. Dido -- White Flag. Is Dido the new Jewel, except with better lyrics?
21. Ja Rule -- The Reign. It hasn't been a great year for JR, but he should have known better. Everybody knows that you can't have a hit by casting Patrick Swayze in a tough guy role, he has to play the sensitive tough guy role.

20. Puffy + B2K -- Bump Bump Bump. Yeah, we all know who the real star power is here. As if these little kids know anything about bumping.
19. Wolfsheim -- Kein Zuruck (~No Way Back). It was new to me, and it wasn't offensive or anything.
18. DJ Tomekk f. Kurupt, Tatwaffe, and G-Style -- Ganxtaville Part 3. This rates through the roof on the unintentional comedy scale. It's like they went out of their way to copy every rap cliche, but only from the years 1992-1994. The closing cry of "Fo Shizzle ma nizzle" had me rolling on the floor.
17. Seeed -- Music Monks, 16. Outlandish -- Aicha. These must have been German hits from the first half of the year. Respect for the way they respresent the homeland as well as the Brit/American megastars.
15. Xtina -- Beautiful. The song that made me regain some respect for her.
14. Black Eyed Peas -- Where is the Love. BEP are nothing more than the 21st Century Fugees. They make hip hop that it's OK for soccer moms to like. It takes such a simple-minded band
to distill a complicated issue of world politics down to such basic language.
13. Robbie Williams -- Come Undone. This must be the sickest video to ever accompany a pop song. The only competition
is the similarly styled "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, but that was far less of a "pop" song, and it certainly wasn't by a "pop idol". Lord knows what British ten-year olds thought of this.
12. Avril Lavigne -- I'm With You. It's the only Canadian entry in the Top 30. In case you were wondering, yes, Avril is indeed played on the radio in Germany every bit as much as she is over here. This song contains a truly amazing Great Pop Moment, it's the chorus that comes about 2:50 into the song, when the longing and admiration in her voice has risen to a boiling point and the song's title flows from her not-such-a-bad-girl mouth with one of pop's most emotional outbursts of the last few years. 11. Eminem -- Sing for the Moment. This is his weakest single to date. I'm just not moved by anything associated with Aerosmith.

10. The Rasmus -- In The Shadows. Decent to good Catchy Pop-Rock from a band I know absolutely nothing about. It's just not rock's year, but you already knew that.
9. Beyonce f. Jay-Z -- Crazy in Love. It's amazing to see how this track and Outkast's "Hey Ya" have united just about every writer in every genre in every major publication in picking the top singles of the year. Now THAT'S perfect pop music.
8. Sean Paul -- Get Busy. Again, not much to say about his amazing success, except that I was somehow unaware of his Toronto connections until recently (he partly grew up here and still has family living in T.O.) and I thought that last year's "Gimme the
Light" was a Neptunes-aided fluke, only to be proved wrong
in startling fashion.
7. Lumidee f. Busta + Fabolous -- Never Leave You (Uh-Oh). The most danceable song of the year that didn't have a backbeat. Not as if there was much competition. A song I rather like as long as I don't hear it three times a day. Therefore, flipping radio stations or listening to CD's once in a while was neccessary. 6. Robbie Williams -- Feel. The video isn't much cop, but the song is wonderful. I never get bored of it.

5. TATU -- All the Things She Said. You'd be forgiven for
thinking that everything had been tried in pop music, every gimmick
extended beyond it's worth, every good idea previously taken or explored by somebody else. But there's always that small subset of music intelligensia who find an opening and drive a Mack truck
of determination and ambition straight through it. This is but one way that great music gets made. In this case, somebody had the foresight to say "You know what we need in pop music? We need RUSSIAN LESBIANS. And they don't even have to be real lesbians, they just have to be really hot young girls who make out at every available oppurtunity so that people think that they're lesbians. Then we paste them to a dance-rock song about love and jealousy and we sell it to the world".

When the song came out, and every struggling music entrepreneur realized they'd been beaten to the punch, they must have simply hung their heads in despair. Russian lesbians? How could that NOT sell records? It makes you marvel at the simplicity of the concept and wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. And the reason you didn't is precisely the genius behind the concept, naturally. Add it all up and you've got the best pure pop single of the year. The
best pop choruses leave you wishing they'd go on and on, but then the song ends so you have no choice but to play it again. Just tremendous stuff.

4. 50 Cent -- In Da Club. Huge, although I could probably rap on a record with Dre and Eminem pulling the strings and it would be a hit.
Let's talk about something else. I was innocently
watching MTV Germany one night, and "P.I.M.P." comes on, a video I've seen many times. I'm not really paying attention, and then suddenly, all the girls aren't wearing any clothes! And 50's on the couch feeling them up! Whoa! Snoop and 50 spend the rest of the video cavorting and enjoying the booty of naked women. What's with this X-rated version? I'd never heard anything about it before. I guess you gotta love European non-censorship.

3. Evanescence f. Paul McCoy -- Bring Me To Life. This song was everywhere in Germany during my trip there in the summer. I certainly can't argue with its placing here, but when half-decent songs become megahits they eventually become suspended in some opinionless netherzone. Great songs (i.e. most of the rest of this top 10) can be heard over and over while losing little of their impact. Half-decent songs get boring after half a dozen listens but remain good enough to not be despised, but bad enough to not care if you never hear it again for as long as you live and breathe.

2. RZA f. Xavier Naidoo -- Ich kenne nichts (das
so schön ist wie du). I'd translate the title as "I Don't Know (What's as Beautiful as You). I suppose this song hasn't been pushed in North America due to the language thing, but I see no reason why it couldn't be as massive here as it was in Germany. It's got a summery hook, a laid back feel, and music is supposed to transcend language barriers.

1. Eminem -- Lose Yourself. The best and most
surprising Oscar-winning song ever, this track probably has done more to motivate young people than an entire year of after-school specials.

I was browsing in Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free yesterday (a primarily indie-rock store in downtown Berlin) and they had the top albums of the year lists from Mojo and NME posted on the wall. Number One according to Mojo, NME, and the two staff members' lists posted on the wall is Elephant by the White Stripes.

Am I missing something? When did the White Stripes become the best and/or most important band in the world? Sure, my tastes haven't been in sync with the NME since the fall of Britpop, but this years' list had me growling like an old curmudgeon, "rrrgghh, this rock and roll garbage, in my day we listened to real music, not this shouty crap". It's one thing to be out of sync, and quite another thing to hold very little respect for the NME's list in part because I don't like most of the stuff on it. The NME Xmas issue has been a holiday highlight for me for a decade, but this year, after seeing the list and the featured contents on their web site, I doubt I'll bother with it this year.

Jon Spencer must be hanging himself -- he released "Orange" a decade too early. I never heard "Plastic Fang", but it must have been really atrocious to have been panned and shunted aside so quickly in the Strokes & Stripes world which we live in, particularly after the large promotional push behind it.

This most recent breed of rock bands has been pushed down our collective musical throats. They've been championed far out of proportion with their bottom line. Enough time has passed for these bands to take their mantle at the forefront of music. But it hasn't happened. The White Stripes are not the Next Big Thing. They are barely even a big thing.

It should be obvious that the biggest trend in music is rap/R&B/urban/etc. It is the dominating style in pop music today, by far. Not only that, the quality is through the roof, as good or better than pop music has been at any time during the rock era. Nobody hyped the urban music takeover, because discussions of the Next Big Thing in music is limited only to the Next Big Rock Thing, because most music criticism is still rock based and the people who write about it are rock-centric to the point that rock is the Music That Truly Matters and everything else doesn't.

The White Stripes struggle to sell a million albums but textbooks of ink are spilled on them. In the meantime, the Neptunes and Timbaland productions dominate the pop charts. Like the Beatles and Motown before them (to name but two examples), they have styles that are indisputably groundbreaking because their music has raised the bar for anyone who plans on writing and producting a hit. Do they get their credit as hitmakers and pop music success stories? Absolutely. Do they get credit for making important, vital, relevant music? Almost never. Does Motown? Of course. Do the Beatles? Ha, what a stupid question.

In 1998, I wrote (in a notebook which preceed the construction of this web site) that a rather large amount of time had passed since the most recent Next Big Thing (grunge, or Britpop if you consider the UK). As a result, writers were subconsciously (or consciously, in some cases) desperate to find the next megatrend and gain lifetime bragging rights for being the first to hype it. They were so desperate that they resorted to hyping anything, such as swing. Like swing had a chance in hell. Or, in the case of electronica, they lumped a whole load of unrelated musics under one buzzword-friendly umbrella and expected it to shift product just based on the holy word alone, giving no thought to marketing strategy or intentions of the artists. Furthermore, I now believe (in 2003) that there will never be another Next Big Thing, no single style such as grunge or soft rock or synth pop that will take over the charts and the papers, no matter what the hype or the critical acclaim. It will never happen again. Let me repeat that. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Never. Again.

Why? Because people's tastes are too diverse. The pop charts mesh dance, rock, and rap without a second thought; music is proliferating at a rate far faster than before, and the internet has made everything readily readible and downloadable, so broadening one's horizons has never been easier. So, a fine website like Pitchfork can ruin a perfectly good year in review by saying that nothing summed up 2003 like the Rapture did. In ten years, people won't remember 2003 as the year of dancepunk any more than we remember 1994 as the year of the New Wave of New Wave (exactly: nobody does remember NWONW, that's the point). They will, however, remember it as the year the Rapture released a pretty decent debut album. Just like I'll remember 2003 as the year I got bigtime into Tindersticks again, and the year of one totally amazing MUTEK festival, and the year I bought the classic MBV albums on vinyl. I won't remember it in terms of some grandiose summary statement, i.e. the year that 90's angst and post-yuppie consumerism gave way to 00's global anti-war 9/11 backlash and public services over fiscal responsibility. Because such loftly summation statements are no longer relevant.

Thus, discussion of the NBT invariably leads down a dumbass path. The electronica hype is a great example of this, because to the average Joe all this music came out of nowhere, the industry didn't know how to sell it and most writers didn't know how to write about it. The only thing everyone could agree on was how to hype it, but of course without the proper context the whole thing came off as looking stupid. I recall a Depeche Mode interview circa "Ultra" (sorry, can't remember what publication), smack in the middle of the electronica uber-hype, and the interviewer asked Dave Gahan if the electronica buzz indicated that it was finally cool to like DM. Gahan lucidly and bluntly blew off the question, merely noting that DM's two biggest albums came at the height of grunge. That just about sums up the magic of early 90's DM.

Behind every electronica story was the endless repartees of "can this stuff sell?", invariably asked by people who had no clue how to sell it. How come nobody brought up the fact that nearly ten years previous, Depeche Mode had sold out the FUCKING ROSE BOWL for the finale of their "101" tour. Yes, I'd say that the music can sell, then. Before "alternative" became "mainstream", Nine Inch Nails had sold two million records and Jane's Addiction had sold out arenas throughout the summer for the inaugural Lollapalooza. In both cases, minimal radio play and MTV hype were involved. Magazines and TV weren't screaming at people about how cool these bands were. That fall, Lollapalooza lucked out when they signed up Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a then-unknown Pearl Jam to play the festival the following summer, only to have all these bands break out simultaneously into the bigtime. Lollapalooza 1992 could have been the almighty grunge celebration extravaganza, but in fact, nobody remembers it for those three bands, they remember it for Ministry blowing everybody off the stage each night. Ministry, the band that had sold out 2000-3000 capacity venues at every stop on their previous national tour, unbenownst to nearly everybody who discovered "alternative" when Nirvana dethroned Michael Jackson.

The point of all these ramblings is that acts can frequently become a Very Very Big Thing without necessarily being hyped as the Next Big Thing. And just as such successes often defy hype and tidy labels, a year of music doesn't deserve to be summarized in one sentence as "The Year of ____". And there's my Year in Review.

I got home at seven AM yesterday, but I couldn't sleep. Why? I started flipping channels, scanned through all of the music video channels on Berlin TV (i.e., MTV, VIVA, etc.) and was entranced by quantity of CHEESY VIDEOS. Honestly, all this shlock came on within the span of twenty minutes.

Ace of Base -- The Sign. Not only is the video cheesy, but the song's production is too. The Neptunes have really spoiled us. Were fast panning, flash cutting, and flying colours considered edgy in early 90's pop video, or is this the exception? Ace of Base were completely harmless pop fluff, therefore, it's easy to recognize why they were so popular. Also, I believe they paved the way for the cute girls + utterly useless boys = pop group trend of the mid to late 90's. I think that trend died with the boy band resurgence. I think people got bored of the implication that pop was excessively manufactured and needed explicit reassurance that this was the case, hence, the boy bands. After all, we are living in the George W. Bush era, so things need to be dumbed down. It's also interesting to recall that those were the days when excessive T&A weren't neccessary for making a pop video. These days, the Ace of Base girls would have been 85% naked on the cover of Maxim within two weeks of the song hitting #1. We all lost out.

Haddaway -- What is Love. A Night at the Roxbury notwithstanding, this is one of those Songs That I Can't Respect Myself For Liking, But I Like Them Anyway. House of Pain's "Jump Around" and Backstreet Boys "As Long As You Love Me" fall into the same category. Let's all recall the early 1990's, a time when black performers sported hairstyles straight out of "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air". Haddaway must have loved the video for Meatloaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love", because the setting here is a virtual replica, albeit with 1/20th of the budget. And unlike the Meatloaf song, there's no storyline to either the video or the lyrics, it's just Haddaway singing the same nine words over and over while engaging in exagerrated hand foppery. Still, I love the tune. Really.

Wham! -- Last Christmas. The campest video of all time featuring horny young singers cavorting with innocent-looking girls-next-door. Except, of course, for Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough". At least Wham! had a half-decent excuse, with this being a Christmas song and all. Christmas songs are supposed to be feelgood campy drivel. DM have no excuse and no recourse except to blame the whole thing on Vince Clarke. The scene where they share the sodas in the diner with the girls may be the lowest moment in Depeche Mode's career. They all look about fourteen and the whole thing is so junior high double date, it's embarrassing.

For some reason, this song gets played on pop radio a lot here. I've heard it more times than I'd care to mention, although not nearly as often as Pink's "Trouble", Black Eyed Peas' "Shut Up" and Westlife's "Mandy" (and it pains me to report that "Mandy" has been added to the list of Songs That I Can't Respect Myself For Liking, But I Like Them Anyway). Back to the video, where Andrew Ridgeley comes across as 100 times cuter and more heartthrob-worthy than the ugly duckling he had the poor misfortune to make over. For the sake of his career, Wham! came along a decade too early. These days boy bands commonly splinter into separate successful solo careers. Ridgeley could have at least been Gary Barlow to George Michael's Robbie Williams.

TV Allstars -- Do They Know It's Christmas? There is no conceivable reason that this recording should exist. Who are these people? British TV stars? Do I really care who they are (no)? I have no desire to watch cheery-eyed kids singing any tune, under any circumstance (this falls under the under-16 rule I formulated during the summer). Seriously, this dancepop-lite rendition is so lightweight it makes Aaron Carter sound like Ritchie Hawtin.

Whitney Houston -- I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Daft colours, daft clothes, daft dancing, and even daft floors. Saturday Night Fever and Billie Jean were the last word in light-up dancefloors, any subsequent attempt to use one has come off looking silly.

I've had far too many late nights lately. Day and night have become indistinguishable and I have no clue what day of the week it is. However, I damn well know what time of year it is, it's time for the

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2003.

However, I'm far less certain of the choices on this year's list than I was in past years. I reserve the right to post something in the new year about how I got the whole thing wrong and left several deserving albums off of the list. This doesn't mean that I
churned it out in my sleep and didn't take the rankings seriously. Far from it. There are few things in life I take more seriously than compiling a Top 10 list. However, when you spend the last two months of the year working in another country and get dumped over the phone while you're there, you tend to have other things on your mind other than music. Not to mention that I've been cut off from the overwhelming bulk of my music collection -- including many of this year's releases -- therefore, this list deserved more thought and perspective than I was able to give it. But I did the best I could.

Some end-of-year thoughts regarding the list include the following:

-- The toughest decision was not the rankings themselves, but
deciding whether Broken Social Scene's "You Forgot it in People" belonged on the list. Even though it was released in October 2002, many publications didn't review it until this year, particularly those based outside of Canada. Heck, even Exclaim!, which is as Canadian as they come, ranked it on their Top 10 this year, which almost convinced me I would be justified in doing the same. But I just couldn't do it. 2002 is 2002, and 2003 is 2003. The record wasn't released this year, so it doesn't belong. If you just got the album this year, or didn't know about it last year, or didn't fully appreciate it twelve months ago, then too bad. I've always held fast to that rule. If I broke it for something from 2002, I might as well put "Loveless" and "Unknown Pleasures" in there too (at least that's always been my reasoning). I still make jokes
about CFNY ranking "Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" as the #1 album of 1995 AND 1996. But the BSS record is a jewel -- Top Five and maybe even Top Three material -- so look for it in six years when I rank the best albums of the decade.

-- The last twenty minutes of Ekkehard Ehlers' "Politik Braucht Keinen Feind" are amazing, amazing, near Album of the
Year Material. The rest of it isn't even close to that level. Maybe I need to start a sub-category of Verve Releases to cover cases like this. The same could be said of Arab Strap's "Monday at the Hug and Pint".

-- You'd have scored big money in Vegas by betting on Blur, Kraftwerk, Spiritualized and Super Furry Animals releasing albums in the same year but having none of them appear on this Top 10. It didn't quite happen, but it almost did. The Blur album is simply shite, I downloaded it and could hardly bear to listen, I was so bored. But back in the day, Blur were The Band I Liked As Much As You Could Possibly Like a Band Without Loving Them, so "Think Tank" wasn't a catastrophic letdown or anything. The SFA album is good, better than "Rings Around the World", but I just haven't gotten around to hearing it much. It's on a hard drive back in Toronto right now. The Kraftwerk album is excellent in parts ("Vitamin", most notably), but also bland and formulaic in other parts
(there was certainly no need for a three part Tour de France suite). As for SPZ, they put out a record I wasn't expecting : a Verve Release.

Two words : O Canada. Total number of Canadian releases on my Top 10 charts, 1993-1997 : 0 .... 1998-2001 : 5 ... 2002-2003 : 9 (!)

So,

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2003.

10. V/A -- 45 SECONDS OF (A SIMBALLREC COMPILATION). Crazy, wild,
breakneck, pick your adjective. Unless someone puts out a "30
Seconds Of" compilation, this will remain the standard bearer on how to convey the most possible musical information on one disc.

9. DESORMAIS -- I AM BROKEN AND REMADE. Plucked strings buzz, groan and wail among an organic, yet unsettling sonic backdrop. And that's only the first track.

8. SPIRITUALIZED -- AMAZING GRACE. Intense, blazing rockers combined with glacial soul ballads -- that's been the SPZ way of life for over a decade now, so perhaps this album isn't such a departure after all. What else -- oh yeah, it's this year's Verve Release.

7. THE SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA BAND WITH CHOIR -- THIS IS OUR PUNK ROCK, THEE RUSTED SATELLITES GATHER + SING. They don't always make it too easy to love: the deliberately strained vocals, the epic track lengths, maudlin interval after maudlin interval -- but the beauty is down there once the layers are peeled off.

6. DO MAKE SAY THINK -- WINTER HYMN COUNTRY HYMN SECRET HYMN. DMST have shifted from proggy noodling and dubby grooves into far more complex, nearly symphonic song structures. The title implies this tri-movement approach, and the music makes good on the promise.

5. POLMO POLPO -- LIKE HEARTS SWELLING. White noise and backporch guitar licks were underrepresented on PP's debut, but never in his live shows. Finally, he's delivered an album that captures that pulsating, trance-y, head-caving spirit. That last sentence makes it sound like a 4/4 techno album -- but it's not that at all. Totally unique.

4. MOGWAI -- HAPPY SONGS FOR HAPPY PEOPLE. Sonically, it's "Rock Action II". But the songwriting took a great leap forward. They're barely hiding their melodies behind noise anymore, they're letting them hang bare instead. Their most tuneful and anthemic album by far.

3. BARDO POND -- ON THE ELLIPSE. Mind blowing jams, crashing noise, tender melodies, and eye-crossing drone-fests are Bardo Pond staples. But usually aren't done this well. And all on the same album. And often all on the same track. Their finest blast of raw power and subtlety.

2. TINDERSTICKS -- WAITING FOR THE MOON. In which a once-great band returns to their former greatness by doing exactly what made them great in the first place. So, it's more or less the same as what they'd been doing all along, but it happened to work out perfectly this time.

1. PLASTIKMAN -- CLOSER. Hey. This is the voice inside your head
telling you to get a pair of headphones and turn out the lights, or walk down a dark street, or stare at the floor, or think unsettling thoughts, and listen to this album. Dark dark pitch black DARK. You can even dance to it if you want, but you probably won't feel like it. Album of the Year.

Simballrec's "45 Seconds Of" compilation isn't just a great CD, it may be the most punk rock thing in my entire collection. The basics are these: it's an album featuring 99 tracks by 84 artists. Each track is exactly 45 seconds long, with no fade ins or outs. Other than that, Simballrec imposed no other submission rules. No rules! How punk is that?

And what could be more punk than a 45 second song? The Minutemen made a career out of it, and look how popular they are today, years after their demise! People crapped themselves over Elastica's supposed "authenticity" when they wrote the 50-second "Vaseline". As if that one song could silence the naysayers who claimed that Elastica were just ripping off melodies from their favourite bands. "See, they wrote a 50-second song -- so they DO mean it, man, they ARE 4Real"! I'm going to sit on the fence with this one. Elastica were shite, but "Vaseline" was the best song they ever wrote. I mean, how can you hate a song that short? It's too short to offend you that much! Before you have a chance to hate it, it's over and you're thinking about something else.

This is one of the secrets behind "45 Seconds Of". Anybody can sound good for 45 seconds. Creating 45 minutes of brilliance is hard, but 45 seconds is dead easy. You barely need even one good idea to fill up 45 seconds. And even then -- a lot of this stuff sounds like throwaway junk that was improvised on the spot without even trying. And that's the beauty of it! Anyone with a few ounces of musical smarts and creativity could have done at least one-third of these tracks themselves! How DIY is that?

The 45-second rule is essentially Step One of a paint-by-numbers punk kit. It ensures that no artist starts to indulge in gamelans or 100-piece choirs, because who's going to waste that stuff on a 45-second recording? Thus, everyone is forced to keep it basic. There's no time for solos, intros, outros, showing off your chops, telling a story, grandiose concepts, or taking the listener on a journey into sound. 45 seconds, no more no less, just get on with it!!

There are established names such as Blevin Blectum and Jan Jelinek slotted right in there among the nobodies (and there are plenty of them). There's no top billing for the stars, their names are written with the same size letters as everyone else's. Punk! Nobody is excluded, everybody can join in! Everyone gets a try! No prima donnas!!

The pace of the record is, as you'd expect, dizzying. So many things are happening so fast. There are no breaks and no pauses. There is no silence. Tune out for a few moments and you've missed three tracks. You say you don't like the track you're hearing now? Who cares! Something else will be along in a few seconds!

After thirty songs or so, you've completely lost track of what's what. You can't remember who did what, what you heard ten minutes ago, and you have no idea what to expect next. Surprise! Excitement! Unpredictability! That's rock and roll, baby!! That's what we love about it! And the damned record keeps going and going and going. After fifty tracks or so, you're desperately in need of a break to have some hope in hell or taking it all in. But the show must go on! And it's only halfway done at this point! You've now got the attention span of an eight year old child who just ate ten chocolate chip cookies and forgot to take his Ritalin in the morning. When it finally does end, your emotional state has run through a considerable psychiatric spectrum, spanning disorientation, frustration, several instances of boredom, and you can't wait to hear the CD again.

I found some time to do a bit of shopping during the past week, which has done well to break up the daily grind of working as well as the monotony of hearing the same damned CD's during the daily grind of working. Finally, some new sounds! Last weekend, I visited Boteca, a small shop specializing in avant-rock, bip-hop, and techno. The bright white walls and impeccable organization make the single room seem emptier than it really is. But there's quite a lot of stuff in there. I was surprised at the the number of Canadian (particularly Montreal) artists in attendence. I was suddenly overcome with the urge to support Canuck interests abroad, so I picked up a disc by Christof Migone, who opened this year's MUTEK festival with lots of crackling and a disturbing video featuring a frozen tomato. So last Wednesday, I returned home from work at noon and gave it a listen -- for about five minutes. I remember hearing a lot of crackling, and then I woke up about four hours later.

Take two, then. This was really for the best, since the darkness provided a better atmosphere for hearing the record. More crackling, scraping, and strange rumblings.

Thirty-three hours later, I left work. What's in my discman again? Oh yeah, Christof Migone. The final track began it's sixteen minute low volume hum as I was walking into my darkened apartment. The mood was ruined by the wierd farting noises which nearly poison the track, before it returns to the humming and fades gently away. Hmmm.

Twelve hours later, following the soundest sleep I can remember, I headed into work for a severely truncated day. It was so truncated that I was shopping only five hours later. I journeyed to Neurotitan in the heart of Mitte. I could find no trace of the store as I walked along the street, but I soon remembered which city I was in so I went to the spot where I'd expected to find the store (based on it's adress) and found the nearest alleyway. At the end of the dingy alley was an entranceway and on a nearby window, there was a nondescript white poster bearing the store's name. Oh yeah, I thought, now there's just no way this place can suck.

A few flights of stairs later, and I was in a place which felt more like a studio apartment than a store. The middle of the room was mainly open spaces, save for a square wooden table and chairs where people were chowing down on fast food. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves and bright colours splashed all over the room thanks to the art and comic books they displayed. The CD racks were small, which caused me some dismay, but that went away once I began flipping though them. Almost everything this store carries is experimental and noise music. Big names like Merzbow rubbed plastic with local artists and countless hard-to-find gems. For vinyl, they carry little more than wierd ambient and techno of the minimal variety (so said the words written with black marker on shards of cardboard above the boxes). Respect.

Behind the store, I discovered the reason for the unusual business hours (open until 10 M-F, until midnight on Saturday, and also open on Sundays, which is extremely rare in Berlin). The store doubles as an art gallery/lounge. It took a few weeks, but I finally had found something cool and different in Berlin.