Author Archives: Alex

Pagan Wanderer Lu

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Pagan Wanderer Lu’s Live at last.fm is a nicely recorded free introduction to the peculiar musical stylings of Andy Regan. A label mate of Napoleon IIIrd whose In Debt To is not only the CD I nearly snapped in half by stepping on it on my floor this week but also my favourite new British act of last year.

Basically you get a mix of organ sounds, urgent vocals and some odd noises whacked on top. What both he and Napoleon IIIrd do is interesting and doubtlessly they will be compared to Badly Drawn Boy if they make it big in any way. But actually I’d rather they just stick to their lo-fi stylings for now and produce obscure pop of this nature. It’s dead good stuff. If you don’t fancy a whole EP, then grab Our New Hospital Sucks in early radio form from his website.

Pagan Wanderer Lu – The Tree Of Knowledge – Live At Last.fm/Presents

Or get Tree Of Knowledge which has a very repetitive beginning with chants in very schoolyard like style and which has for me the lyric that is a gold standard and hard to beat.

Christians like you are why god invented lions

And there’s the bit that sounds like him taking out the tape and playing it backwards. I dearly hope that’s what he did. Shame, his technology minorly fails him near the end, but I disagree with him, the lad deserves applause.

Can’t wait for the album…

Rent

An interesting study reckons the way to sort out the rental market in London would be to encourage bigger brands and longer lets with branded build to let schemes. Now I can definitely see the attraction in this, because if I’m going to rent a property I’d rather it was modern, and well built, with someone caring for the whole block. Obviously if there’s a single owner this would be a good idea, and when you look at the proportion of new build flats that are bought solely to let as an investment there must be mileage in building such properties to be let.

Also, if I’m paying a more sensible rent for a higher quality property then I’ll either not want to buy a place or when I do I’ll actually have more of a deposit together thus negating the need to look for one of the now disappeared 125% mortgages.

There’s definitely the germ of a good idea in this, and it could be approached as a green policy if it helped foster a form of letting that encouraged owners to invest in energy efficiency and the like. Certainly as tenants move house more often than owners they are far more likely to make some form of choice based on a Home Information Pack like energy rating. And this is exactly the kind of scheme I had in my head when I objected to the new office block at the bottom of my road and instead suggested the council build something I could afford to rent/buy and live in.

And if you want to read the actual report it’s over here.

Kelpe, Kelpe please!

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[myspace]

Rather glad to come home earlier this week to find the new Kelpe album Ex-Aquarium had popped through the letterbox. I’ve been listenning to Kelpe rather a lot since coming accross him on the rather lovely DC Recordings compilation Death Before Distemper, where his Quick Broken Harp is two minutes of evil glitchy electronic genius. There aren’t many modern electronica tracks which are both excellent and make for a disconcerting and brilliant ring tone.

This led me on to his first album Sea Inside Body which proved to be my favourite bath time listenning of 2007. Age Sculpture and Age Concerns are easily the highlights of the album with some glitchy genius underscoring the disorienting nature of growing up as remarked upon by a number of samples from documentaries on young ladies. And it sounds a lot better than I just made it sound, honest. What Kelpe seems very hooked on in these tracks and most of his work is playing about with sounds that are noticeably imperfect, be they slightly off-key melodies that feel very Boards Of Canada like, samples which have been down sampled enough that you can hear the gaps and also an appreciation of “warm” organ sounds. All things I like, basically.

On the new album there is more stuff to harp on about in the shape of Half Broken Harp which is kind of a 12″ extended remix of Quick Broken Harp made to feel much more organic and also to reveal, candidly almost, just how much he’s played about with his harp samples as it builds slowly from a clean sample to the original track after 80 seconds when the beat finally kicks in. In this it’s reminiscent of Venetian Snares, and as a fellow Amigan I’ll note here that both Kelpe and Venetian Snares started their musical heritage on such an instrument/home computer without becoming as shit as Calvin Harris. I won’t attempt to coin a term for a musical genre to ghetto-ise such artists into though.

Kelpe – Shipwreck glue has ping-pong samples in it as well. Another thing I like, well, ever since Susumu Yokota anyway.

So, listen to the new album at the least – it’s rather nice.