Category: music

Photomaton

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I heard this song on the new Peugeot “Pinocchio robot” advert. I liked it: it’s got a quirky, 90s feel to it – and there’s definitely more than a touch of St Etienne in there too.
A quick bit of googling led me to Jabberwocky (featuring Elodie Wildstars) and the song Photomaton.

And then I saw the video:

Yeah. Not at all disturbing or off-putting in any way. [mildly alarmed face] But what a double act.
Sorry about the brief boob and bum, by the way. Well, a bit sorry.

Wikipedia tells us:

Jabberwocky, sometimes stylized as JBBRWCK, is a French electropop band. It was formed in 2013 by three young French producers Camille, Manu and Simon, still studying medicine and all originating from Poitiers, France.

This, their first single, got to number two in the French charts. The follow-up (called Pola, and featuring Golshifteh Farahani and Clara Cappagli) made it to number 172 in the French charts, which must mean that not even everyone in the band bothered to buy a copy. (It’s not that bad.)

Un Hit Wonder, anyone?

Washing machine dances to PsyTrance

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Ah, this takes me back to those good old raving days. We’ve all been an unregulated washing machine on an all-nighter at one time or another, right?

Even if you mute the music (understandable if it’s not your thing), you should really watch this all the way through because there are a couple of things that you can take from this; firstly that there seems no more fitting entity than a rapidly spinning, out of control washing machine to accompany this genre of music, and secondly that the structural integrity of the washing machine is maintained for an almost implausible length of time, given the rather extreme forces at work here.

That second point should at least reassure you that something would have to go very, very, very wrong for your home appliance to go rogue and destroy your laundry, kitchen, utility room, bathroom, outhouse or wherever you choose to do your washing.

Next week, a toaster does Swan Lake.

Birdhouse In Your Soul

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I know. You’re singing it already, aren’t you?

I’m your only friend,
I’m not your only friend
But I’m a little glowing friend,
But really I’m not actually your friend,
But I am.

Flashback to 1990 and John Flansburgh and John Linnell’s retro 1960’s robot-inspired brand of alternative indie rock. This was the hit from their album Flood which I had – and probably still do have somewhere – on cassette.

More recently, I was amazed to see their name on the credits for the “Hot Dog” theme to The Mickey Mouse Funhouse: a series I used to watch with alarming regularity. But this was their biggest hit – their only hit, really – before they moved into kids’ music and won a Grammy.
But who could blame them for making up wonderful nonsense for children when their stuff for adults contained such wonderful nonsense as:

So the room must listen to me,
Filibuster vigilantly.
My name is blue canary,
One note: spell L-I-T-E.

The whole of Flood was rather experimental – 43 minutes of weirdness over 18 songs – but suddenly, I’m anxious to revisit it.

How many seconds to Mars?

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Today is the day that was meant to be the day that 30 Seconds To Mars were due to play Grand West Arena and we were meant to be there. However, as few weeks ago, as we mentioned here, they postponed their visit until November.

I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and I reckon that the time between tonight and their actual appearance is 13,996,800 seconds. So basically, that’s 14 million seconds until 30 Seconds To Mars.
That’s a lot of seconds and so in the meantime, here’s a little something to keep you going:

The irony of all these numbers is that Google gives the average time for an actual journey to Mars as 115 days, and that’s just 9,936,000 seconds. So yes, you could get all the way to Mars and about halfway back as well in the time that it’s going to take Jared et al. to come to see us in Cape Town.

I know that we’re right on the bottom corner of a continent and all that, but really, we’re not that difficult to get to, are we?