I Feel Love

25 from the 00s | 21: Herbert - Addiction (2002)

(download)

Of all the criticisms commonly levelled at Matthew Herbert, the one I understand the least goes like this: Herbert's creative process is based on pompous, idelogically driven manifestos, therefore his output after a certain date ("Around the House" is normally cited as the turning point) is dessicated and inaccessible. Not only do I find this a non sequitur - I think it's an opinion you could only really hold if you've either never listened to Herbert's music, or never listened to any music that was actually dessicated and inaccessible (Boulez's piano sonatas, say). If pompous manifestos produce music as gorgeous and lushly textured as the "Bodliy Functions" LP from which this track comes, let's have more of them.

25 from the 00s | 22: Cut Copy - Hearts on Fire (2007)

Melbourne's finest! Thanks to my well-earned scepticism about Australian dance music, I took a look time to even listen to Cut Copy, but I ended up being completely entranced by their album In Ghost Colours - surely the best Australian dance album ever? Well, indie-dance I guess, but none the worse for that. This track is typical in the way it throws together a whole lot of influences in a way that shouldn't work but somehow does - there's a bit that sounds like early 90s commercial dance, a bit that sounds like INXS (hello sax solo!), and of course a long bit that sounds like The Cure. But still we end up with a beautifully restrained pop song.

25 from the 00s | 23: Bloc Party - Banquet (2004)

Bloc Party disappointed me. After their first couple of singles I was all set to adopt them as my token rock band. Then their album came out and it was full of worthy, dirgelike indie borefests. But this early effort is a storming single - the motorik drums, the enthusiastically yelped high notes, and above all the coruscating middle 8, from a decade that basically forgot how to do middle 8s. You'd have to be dead not to be a little bit thrilled.

25 from the 00s | 24: Alexander Robotnick - Disco Sick (Tensnake Remix) (2008)

(download)

There wasn't much buzz about this track - at least not that I ever heard - but it's one of my favourites from the nu-disco/nu-italo/nu-balearic boom of the latter half of the 00s. While this general tendency has been my favourite thing to happen in dance music for ages, I do find some of the more celebrated exponents (such as Lindström) a bit too balearic at times - if by balearic you mean "slow". This track on the other hand is ruthlessly aimed at the dancefloor, and there's the extra frisson of one of the new crowd remixing an Italo legend. German producer Tensnake has a particular way with semiquaver basslines, heard to great effect here: listen for the broken bassline in the first 2/3 of the track which gets "filled in" after the breakdown.

25 from the 00s | 25: Pharrell - Frontin' (2003)

And now, my modest contribution to the flood of decade-end music roundups. I've picked 25 of my favourite songs of the decade, and I'm going to be posting one a day until the end of the year. It's a very personal list, it reflects what I'm listening to now (a few years ago there would have been a lot more "minimal" needless to say), and I've made no effort whatsoever to achieve any kind of balance between genres - although I have imposed a "one track per artist" rule.

I'll say a bit about each song but I'll keep it brief. If there's a YouTube video I'll post it, otherwise I'll load up a low-quality MP3 for y'all.

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To begin, one of my favourite tracks from the Neptunes. Reactions to it at the time were tied up with a sense of exhaustion and ubiquity regarding not only the Neptunes as producers but Pharrell himself as a persona - his endless parade of video cameos, his grandstanding, his ghetto affectations etc. Well, of course this song implicitly concedes a lot of those criticisms, and for that matter I find almost everything about it disarming, from the technically imperfect falsetto to the politely cajoling way Pharrell sings the words "tear your ass up".

Sure, at the end of the decade the Neptunes sound like a dead end, but at their best they're a pretty glorious one.

Makatron solo show

Makatron, a friend of mine and one of Melbourne's most respected street artists (ha ha I say that like I know...but so I'm informed anyway and I really like his stuff) has a solo show coming up. Don't miss it! (Hint: If you tell everyone you meet that you are going to a graffiti show you will sound cooler than you actually are.)

Hervé This has a blog!

Here's a very rough translation of his latest post (original here). Interesting stuff.

Proposal for change

You can't criticise the hierarchical list published by the British magazine Restaurants ("the best restaurant in the world") while at the same time permitting the rating of chefs by stars or marks out of 10, as in the Michelin Guide, for example.

Isn't it time that, as I suggested several years ago, we start distinguishing between artisans and artists? For artisans, the criteria are relatively simple, because they are technical in nature. If you ask an artisan for a tender, rare steak, you expect to get what you asked for. And since there are degrees of technical difficulty, we could rate artisans, and even establish a relationship between quality and price, by devising a kind of "technical grade" based on price.

On the other hand, when it comes to art, how can we say whether W.A. Mozart is better than J.S. Bach, if Flaubert is less good than Rabelais, if Picasso is better than Rembrandt? In artistic cuisine, the technique must obviously be flawless, as in painting: how can one hope to arouse a specific feeling if one can't hold a paintbrush, play the violin, or construct a sentence?

This being the case, how should we rate artists?

I propose that we fight against the idiotic ratings of Restaurant magazine, but I also demand that the Michelin Guide change its lazy habits: let us distinguish artisans and artists, and for artists, let us try to give readers of the guide an idea of the style that they might find in restaurants dedicated to artistic cuisine.

Please understand that I'm not militating on behalf of molecular cuisine, but simply so that culinary art (and not "the culinary arts": there is only one, the good one) might be recognised as it should be, in a more legible manner than yesterday and today.

Projection; secrets and lies at Larvatus Prodeo

Pure Ideology

SIr, I admit nothing of the sort!