zero 7 w/ jose gonzalez and sia (psapp opens) @ brixton academy

holy shit. brixton academy is r-a-d. i'd heard so many great things about it but hadn't seen a show yet. every opportunity was shot down by sold out tickets to shows i knew were kinda safe. so i read today that jose gonzalez wasn't opening for zero 7 but playing with them and i had no idea what that was going to sound like. i dragged don and helen along and the show was awesome.

again, the venue is phenomenal. it's massive. the building is kinda grand but not nearly what you'd expect. imagine walking through the doors, going through hallways, entering into a parlour where there are stairs to the upstairs (think opera house) and then stumbling into someone's backyard. except that they've turned their backyard into an indoor arena. seats upstairs, standing downstairs (but on an incline) and pretty awesome decor. anyway, yes i'm obsessing but it was really cool. oh and don't even get me started on the lighting...

psapp were quirky but fun. they dweebed it up on stage by playing as many instruments as possible to get everyone's attention but after song 2, i realised it was a decent show. they were definitely stoked to be playing at the brixton academy and their energy was contagious - good stuff. bonus: the obsession with cats materialised in the throwing of little toys to the audience. a few condoms were distributed as well. yay for safe sex.

zero 7 came out with very little time between and, i thought, divided the stage time quite nicely between sia, jose gonzalez and their own stuff. sia looks quite small on stage and when talking sounds even smaller but as soon as she starts singing, it's like her lungs are twice the size and her sound fills the room. she is amazing. jose gonzalez, or the gonz (thanks pitchfork) was equally amazing but in his own, quiet swedish way. it was all just a nice welcome to live music in london.

so there it is. good night out in brixton. pictures from other adventures to come soon.

my emusic rant

eryn sent me a little emusic "sign up and get 25 songs free" email and i'm all about guilt-free downloads so i signed up. with my 25 free songs, i "purchased" two albums: stars - set yourself on fire and architecture in helsinki - in case we die. i'm happy with my choices, in fact, i'm ecstatic because it just turns out that one album had 12 tracks and the other 13, equalling a very lovely (and very appropriate) 25. my problem is that it took me about a week to sift through all of the albums i wanted and for me to a. find them on emusic (they're still updating of course) and b. for the entire album to be on there. nothing guts me more than seeing all but one track of an album available for purchase. what is that? that is, in essence, an anti-music loving practice. i've already resigned myself to digital because they're much easier to move around than cds but not buying a whole album is kinda... well... weird. so i don't like emusic anymore.
in expansion of my boycott of stupid people, i'm also boycotting emusic. one thing i do like about them right now is that i can cancel online instead of having to call in. that is a major selling point. now if they could just keep albums whole...

new obsessions:

the taiko: a double-headed japanese drum. we learned it in class today and i've jumped ships. screw the chinese ensemble. i played it in front of my class today, sight-read the whole thing first time through and my teacher told me i rocked it. nice.

hare krishna food: everyday at 1pm, the hare krishna man sets up shop outside the school gates and we all line up in hopes that we'll get to him before the food runs out. it's a significant portion of fabulous food for a small donation (even 1p would work but who would do that to the hare krishna man?)

boys in my class with awesome accents: this is a platonic obsession. i just can't imagine ever getting sick of hearing them speak. it's fantastic. there's a mexican boy and a japanese boy and a korean boy and a british boy. (and then there's the boy from argentina who isn't in my class but who is just very pretty).

actually finding books in the library: it's not easy. first you have to look the book up, then you have to write down the class mark (the letters followed by the incredibly long number with decimal points) and then you have to find out where in the library the letters/numbers correspond to and then you have to go to the place it should be, realise it's not in its place, go to the reshelving unit, realise it's not there either and then just go back to the bookshelf and kinda scan the shelves above and below where it should be and maybe find it. otherwise, you have to go downstairs and fill in a "missing book form" at which point they will email you as soon as you've left school and arrived home and say, "oh yes, i looked for the book and the class mark was wrong, so now it's been put in the right place and i've told the librarian".

learning random words in random languages: i live with 6 other people and between us, we speak 8 languages. this is totally my kind of dorky fun.

camden town and covent garden: great places to shop. covent garden for actual stores and camden town for the markets. absolutely fantastic. and apparently the food is great there too.

because it's what freakin' jesus would do?

the whole house is obsessed with gray's anatomy and it's becoming a problem. i started watching them by myself. just one or two at first and then suddenly i was up all night watching the entire first season, which i've already seen multiple times. i'm strongly advising anyone against this. i have never experienced so many different emotions in such a short span of time. i think i may have broken something. seriously.
anyway, after swearing myself off of doing that, i managed to do it again with the first bit of the second season. and i'm still strongly advising against it. i've asked my housemates to keep the discs away because i can't seem to hold off without help. but after the boys in the house realised all the girls in the house were seriously emotionally involved in something, they needed to find out what it was and now they're hooked too.
so we've all been watching gray's together, which is sweet i guess and at least i'm not watching by myself... but... like... what are we gonna do when we run out? we're already pooling resources to buy the third season off itunes. problematic.

i'm gonna start working tomorrow and with all this gray's viewings... when am i gonna have time to read?

why don't asians have rhythm?

today's topic was music and identity. of course we started out with the meaning of identity (ugh) and on to how music tends to construct identity as opposed to reflect or represent it. anyway, after the break, we watched 'clowns in the hood' or something sort of like 'rize' but a little rawer - not in imagery but production. this was intended to show us the construction of an identity or even a community. so really, the point of all this is that we listened to a pan-asian jazz group. the author had asked a black jazz musician friend of hers what he thought and he said, "technically speaking, they are very good. they're just... kinda stiff". this didn't surprise me. the class sort of tip-toed back and forth over the issue of racial boundaries etc until i said that i wasn't at all surprised or offended by the stereotype that asians don't have rhythm. because it's kinda true. china taught me that there is no room for improvisation. there isn't anything beyond the stuff on the paper. maybe this is why we're so damn good with the numbers.

thoughts?

"are you chinese?"

so i'm still sick and now that it's been 4 days, i think i'm allowed to whinge a little bit. so here it goes: mooooooom, i can't stop coughing. i've tried everyone's home remedies (including just taking everything and hoping for the best) and this morning, chunchun (aka crystal) gave me this chinese medicine. i have a cold and it still smells foul. i think i remember taking this in china, so it's legit.
chunchun likes to speak to me in chinese, because... i look like i should be able to speak and i always respond in english because... i can't really speak chinese anymore as it turns out. it's only minorly embarassing. it becomes majorly (?) embarassing when she insists on asking me if i'm chinese. i keep telling her yes. and i keep telling her i'm one of the bad ones. so i always try to make it up by talking about chinese history or even better, chinese art history (her field) to maybe convince her that i'm at least trying.
yesterday, don (another roommate) asked me if chinese people thought americans were violent. apparently that's the general consensus in the middle eastern countries he's lived in. i'm starting to believe that chinese people (read: crystal) think that americans are stupid. so stupid that they make chinese people who go live there stupid as well. just by being near each other. this stupidity, chinese people imagine, is what dissolves the guilt that lines ones soul.

i hate being sick.

siiiiiiiick

yea i'm sick. yesterday i thought it was just a sore throat from the shisha bar the night before. alas, no. it's a full-blown constant coughing, barred breathing, stuffy ... sinuses? though possibly still from the shisha bar. yea, so you get it, i'm sick. on to better things.

last night, all the postgrad music students and faculty met at our department head's house. we all had to bring food or booze and we really didn't know what to expect but it turned out pretty rad.
david hughes, head-on-sabbatical was there and out in teaching mode.
and i finally met pretty much all of the students in my program. and there weren't undergrads around to confuse me and waste my time :)
and a guy played the didgeridoo. i'd never really heard and definitely never seen anyone play the didgeridoo. i was going on the assumption that it was limited to a very deep, resonanting sound, the resonance being the attraction. but i was pretty wrong. there's a lot of texture and alongside alot of spitting, there's a lot of pretty fantastic rhythm. AND circular breathing (which i am especially jealous of now, ps).
and the food was great. there was a korean rice dish, japanese dessert, indian(?) lentil salad, italian bread thing, tamarind etc etc. it was very impressive. i, of course, being the show off that i am, brought chips and dip and my partner in crime* brought brownies. we are REAL party people.

*helen is in all of my classes so we're together a lot. she's an england-born Francais. she studied the erhu (two-stringed, bowed fiddle) at the shanghai conservatory. i'm going to try to learn either the sanxian (three-stringed plucked guitar) or the pipa (lute).

it is hard to be at a university like this and be around people like those in my program and not feel a little underachieved. most people speak at least 2 languages, not including dialects. most have travelled to places i've never been to and honestly would never have thought to travel to. a fair amount have grown up all over the world. i may have to get a fro again just to feel interesting.

"does it smell like burnt toast?"

so we had our third fire alarm go off today. i was fortunately not around for the first two but as i sat here reading jonathan stock's analysis of the advantages of the recent rise in biographies in the field of ethnomusicology, the blasted alarm went off. everyone's natural reaction was to poke their respective heads out the door and see who's in and go back into their rooms to collect valuables. a full three minutes later, everyone had come back out and started casually making their way down the stairs, knowing full well that there wasn't a real fire. but at the second floor (really the third floor), people started rushing a little bit and us at the back of the line were wondering what's going on. suddenly everybody was asking everybody else if it smelled like burnt toast. and yea, it sure did.
it's disconcerting that there are people burning enough toast to set the fire alarm off. it's also disconcerting that there are people who smell burnt toast and assume there's a massive fire raging and start running.
so... that's all. we waited outside while i quietly hoped that the burnt toast started a fire so huge that my copy of jonathan stock's analysis was slowly burning to its ash version but here i am and it's still right in front of me.
shame.

"what is ethnomusicology?"

i've had two of my three classes so far this week. the first, ethnomusicology in practice, was encouraging. only 14 people in the class, a seemingly chill prof. and a reading list of 13 pages for the entire year (albeit at size 10 font). the second, chinese cinema and media, was interesting. only 4 people in the class, a seemingly cool prof. and a reading list of 18 pages for this term (11 weeks). let's do some math. 18 pages... 11 weeks... no, screw the math, how bout some reading? i can't say i'm not scared. but moving on...

what is ethnomusicology? after going to class i realised i was on sorta the right track. it's essentially undefinable. my first ethno class consisted of the faculty sitting around in a semi-circle facing the rest of us explaining what they thought ethnomusicology was. what it meant to them. it was enlightening. not in the sense that i understand any moreso what i'm studying but that i am definitely studying with people who are as fond of the ... as i am. note, that isn't a ___ but a ...
to explain,
"well... to me...ethnomusicology isn't as much a ... discipline... as it is... a way of ... thinking... i s'pose"

and in that muddy clarity, i am completely comfortable here.
a present for you:

what do you think? (yes, i took it)