Joe.Blog

Discovering this feature sped up production of SydneyMusic's daily Instagram stories to an insane degree. Wonder what other life-saving hacks are buried in there.

We're also using the Stylebot browser extension to reformat the guide to the story presentation format.

Every Monday night is gig guide update night, and I have a new loft workspace which I'm happy to report is a fantastic place to get shit done. My humble KRKs and mixing desk are plugged in, and I can focus - except for when I decide to start blogging.

So anyway, updating the gig guide: there's heaps going on! 80 manually sourced gigs added this evening, and I'm expecting that there'll probably be that again for the scraped gigs. Probably tackle that another night.

Today the Gig Guide Update Soundtrack was ...

• Rival Consoles - Coda (Single) [Bandcamp]

No idea why RC popped into my head as I sat down to update, but I'm glad it did. This is the UK producer's latest single from mid-2023, and it's a fleeting, gorgeous little bit of 5am party magic - a gorgeously warped and distorted synth droning in woozy shape-shifting repetition, before a beat fades into view ... I'm getting first-hint-of-sunrise energy.

• Annabelle Scobie - cat allergy (Single) [YouTube]

I hadn't really clicked onto AS until GIRLINEORA's debut show the other night. She then guested at LILPIXIE's excellent set at Lazy Thinking (what a space!!) yesterday afternoon, and I'm starting to get some context now. Her production is incredible - ranges all over the map, but is a heavily DI bedroom pop-filtered lens referencing anything from 90s indie rock and shoegaze to cloud rap and UK garage revival. This track is where I started when Caitlin mentioned she'd been rinsing it since it came out. It packs a lot into its 1m39s running time.

... which took me down a wormhole of Scobie's other tracks and production work to another GIRLINEORA band member ...

• Cherry Rype - Crying At The Rave (Single) [YouTube]

I'd passively heard some tracks but hadn't tuned into Cherry Rype (there is so much music all the time). Love this. Her Goodgirlsgetluvbombed LP is an ambitious, lush, genre-blending journey that covers some serious ground thematically and sonically. But here's "Crying At The Rave" - another heavily UK two step-indebted pop sugar rush that's a perfect light-trails-on-the-super-8 number.

• And here, have a surprise Loopsnake (!!) dub of the same track [YouTube] that I had no that the idea that the legend turned in. Miss you Maxam.

• Repo Man - Repo Man (LP) [Bandcamp]

Gigantic, melodramatic, 'verbed-out post-punk. See them playing around town a bit with the likes of Zeahorse, PEEL, The Laurels - you know the deal. They're good. Think the drama and atmosphere of The Chameleons, with a dash of the morbidity of Bauhaus, you could even pick up some of Echo & The Bunnymen's more out-there moments. This 2021 album's positively dripping in VST reverb, but the band uses the murk to keep things broody and intense to excellent effect. If you'd like a completely unrelated bonus, there's a Seoul artist with the same name that is producing absolutely demented lo-fi tapes that I also can't recommend highly enough.

The kids and I started our film photography journey in the lead-up to Xmas. They're shooting on a Kodak Ektar H35 half-frame camera, while I semi-impulse bought a mid-70s Canon AE-1 with a 50mm f1.4 lens. We're trading rolls of film and prints in the mail, back and forth. So far it's been a lot of fun.

I had a multi-year go at getting into the practice of photography on a Canon EOS DSLR about 15 years ago but it never really clicked the way I hoped it would. Shooting film, on the other hand, has been a revelation from the get-go: the constraints and the simplicity are wonderful, there's something very meditative about the practice, and chipping away at getting better at something but needing to wait for the results is an excellent exercise in patience.

Thanks to Sydney Super8 on South King in Newtown for getting me started. As chaotic as this little store can be at times, it's a fantastic little local business of real ones - they've been super generous with advice.