THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF FLAGWOMAN

BLOGGER: paul vickers
LOCATION: edinburgh
PAUL'S BANDS: paul vickers and the leg, dawn of the replicants
LABEL: sl records

THE ADMIRAL'S JUNKBOX May 08

BLOGGER: cameron jack
LOCATION: scottish borders
BAND: the stark palace
LABEL: shark batter records

I've noticed (courtesy of The Times obituary column) that this past few weeks has seen the demise of two pioneers of electronic music.

Tristram Cary (son of novelist Joyce Cary) helped develop the VCS3 synthesizer, which was used on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon and by Brian Eno, amongst many others. It was seen as the only serious competitor to the better known Moog. He also scored the first episode of Dr. Who to feature the Daleks,The Dead Planet, and contributed to further episodes and series, including The Daleks Masterplan. His music, along with that of Delia Derbyshire and the rest of the B.B.C. Radiophonic Workshop more than made up for any shortcomings in the prop department!

Also the recently departed Bebe Barron, who is credited, along with her husband Louis with composing the first ever music on tape. I was impressed to discover that they wrote the score for Forbidden Planet, the first for Hollywood to be completely electronic. I wonder what Shakespeare would have made of it! They had previously set up their own studio in Greenwich Village, where they would frequently record for the likes of Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams and Aldous Huxley, and were approached by M.G.M. after their production chief discovered them by chance at a Beatnik club.

You can find out more about Tristram Cary at tristramcary.com, and Bebe Barron at, wait for it, wikipedia, amongst many others whose addresses are too convoluted to reproduce here!

VACUUM SPASM BLOG May 08

BLOGGER: charles s bravo
LOCATION: scottish borders
BAND: vacuum spasm babies
LABEL: shark batter records

"Blimey Charlie!" my brother in rock Malcolm said to me as I brought him the news that within 24 hours the title track from our new E.P. had been played on BBC Radio 1 and had a review in The List. ‘Punch in the Face’ is taken from The Thin Man E.P - Vacuum Spasm Babies four track release from our friends at Shark Batter Records, home of The Stark Palace, The Stone Ghost Collective and Mike and Michi amongst others.

So that means that Vacuum Spasm Babies have been played on the radio, and had a mention in the press. Even if nothing else happens, I’m happy with that. The Radio 1 play came from Vic Galloway on his show he does from Scotland. I’ve known Vic a while, he was a plugger for Human Condition records in Edinburgh and in a band called Huckleberry, so I played his records when I did a new music show for Radio Borders. We’re telling people South of the border that The List is the equivalent of Time Out for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

We’ve made a video for this single release. Although, it’s probably going to take some sort of prize for being the cheapest, shortest and fastest put together video on youtube this week. The song is only just over a minute anyway, and the video is made of stills of scribbles done in an afternoon, photographed, loaded into some kind of free movie software and made to fit around the song.



This week I’m reading The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, watching the Spaced box set, drinking cinzano on ice and staying clear of the new Coldplay single.

KONO MICHI BLOG April 2008

BLOGGER: kono michi
LOCATION: brooklyn, new york (currently on tour)
MICHI's MUSIC: kono michi
LABEL: shark batter records
WEBSITE: myspace.com/konomichi

Greetings from the window seat of an airplane somewhere over Utah, heading to San Francisco from Washington D.C. I’m with ECCO and all 17 of us just spent a week in Virginia, where Jan Lodal, a former Bill Clinton aide, generously gave us the keys to his vacation property, a beautiful and secluded place surrounded by miles and miles of farmland. He and his wife are big music and art fans and have offered to help out us starving musicians. Lucky for us, they’ve given us an open invitation to the “farm” so about once a year we all get to leave our hectic lives and live like a bunch of rich kids for a few days and run amok.



Actually, we operate very well when left to our own devices… we really just turn into a bunch of hippies. We rehearsed for hours each day, cooked huge feasts, danced, discussed, drank…



Yesterday we drove from the farm to D.C. to play a house concert at Jan Lodals’ home. To an audience full of politicians, ambassadors, scientists and generally wealthy and powerful Democrats, we played Grieg, Biber, a Piazzola Tango, Bartok Divertimento, and my arrangement of La Follia. After the concert somebody referred to us as “rock stars of the classical world” which I of course considered the highest compliment. “Balls to the wall” is a term that was actually used on one of our rehearsals… by a girl!



That was last night, and today we’re flying to San Francisco where we give a concert tomorrow night.



2 days later… Our trip to San Francisco was tons of fun, and the concert went well. I had some friends and family in the audience, so they joined us and we stormed an Ethiopian restaurant on Haight Ashbury afterward where we all got drunk and ate with our hands (not because we were drunk).



It’s Monday and I’ve just arrived in Orange County from San Francisco, to my parents’ house where I will embark on 3 days of intense violin practicing and laying low with my family as I get ready for the concert I’ve been most excited about and terrified of for a few months.



I’ll be playing Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy and Zigeunerweisen with the Victoria Symphony in Texas on Saturday. Carmen is considered one of the most difficult pieces (technically speaking) in the violin repertoire, and somehow I managed to avoid learning it when I was a student, so I’m doing the nitty gritty work now. Now that I have most of the technical stuff down, it’s getting more and more fun since I get to channel my inner gypsy. I’m really looking forward to doing my laundry today.



Before this ECCO tour I had a couple of concerts with the LAPQ – one in Connecticut and one in Palm Springs (where we drove down streets with names like “Sammy Davis Jr. Blvd” and “Frank Sinatra Way”) Then I played 2 California concerts with a new music group called Antares. The program included Messaien’s Quartet For the End of Time, which is one of my all-time favorite compositions. Messaien wrote it in a concentration camp during WWII for the random instruments the people around him happened to have – violin, clarinet, cello, and piano. The piece is full off misery, struggle, pain, beauty, hope, and an eventual ascent to heaven which will leave your face red and tear-streaked whether you believe in heaven or not. When Thom Yorke announced that Messaien was one of Radiohead’s sources of artistic inspiration, and it made me love them even more.



After I return to New York from Texas, I have a few days to get ready for a week of concerts in Cleveland, and then come mid-May, I’m officially free for TWO MONTHS. I can’t wait! I’m dreaming of vacation. I’ve had tons of song ideas that I’ve been forced to neglect since being on the road, but I’ve been obsessed with the rhythm of bouncing balls and birdcalls. I have to try not to get too excited about that right now, though, and focus on the task at hand, which is to get my fucking fingers to move at the speed of light. Wish me luck!







michi wiancko

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF FLAGWOMAN

BLOGGER: paul vickers
LOCATION: edinburgh
PAUL'S BANDS: paul vickers and the leg, dawn of the replicants
LABEL: sl records

DUMB/SULK TRIGG-ER BLOG April 2008

BLOGGER: rogerSIMIAN
LOCATION: scottish borders
ROGER'S BANDS: the stark palace, dawn of the replicants
LABEL: shark batter records

* KONO MICHI: An Interview w/ Michi Wiancko *



Brooklyn is home to some of my favourite acts of the moment: TV On The Radio, Santogold and Kono Michi - Kono Michi being the song-writing project of my label-mate, Michi Wiancko, a professional classical violinist, brought up in Orange County, trained at Juilliard and long time resident of Brooklyn's thriving Indie community. Michi's day job involves touring the world with orchestras, often as a soloist, but there's nothing she loves more than recording her songs in her apartment (using voice, violin, toy instruments and computer beats) or playing them live with an ever-changing string quartet line-up. This is a Reader's Digest type teaser of the full-length interview, which can be read at SharkBatter.com.

Roger: What have been the big influences on the music of Kono Michi?

Michi: This is the kind of question I would probably answer way too thoroughly. I'd start by listing all my favorite bands, composers, artists, performers. Then I'd tell you about people and events and movies and experiences that had a lot of influence on me, and then lots of random things like rain and animals and death.

Roger: When did you first start hatching plans of pursuing a career as a song-writer?

Michi: I've been silently sneaking up on the egg very slowly for a very long time, but it really didn't start beginning to hatch until about three years ago. It's still hatching, it's a big egg, and I can sort of see something fuzzy and cute inside, but with a sharp beak and very odd-looking feet.

Roger: Oh, I think I've heard that beak pecking at glockenspiels on your song When I Don't Come Back. Traveling the world as a rock musician has been described as "tourism in the dark". Bands see very little of the cities they visit, jumping from hotel, to venue, to bar, to hotel (as satirized in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels). Is it a similar situation in the classical world, or is there a tad more luxury and glamour?

Michi: Most of the time I'm in a generic budget chain hotel, which looks exactly like the last one I was in, and I don't stay much longer than a day or two, so all I see of the area are the roads that connect the airport, hotel and concert hall. When I play a solo with an orchestra, I'm usually put up in a pretty swanky hotel with featherbeds and room service, and then I hoard as many free bath products and mini-ketchup bottles as I can. Sometimes I'm hosted in a private home, which sucks if the host knocks on your bedroom door at 7 am because they expect you to join them for breakfast at 8 am, but is awesome if they just leave you the keys while they are on vacation and you can walk around naked and be surrounded by family portraits and photographs of people you've never met in your entire life, and never will.

My international experiences have all been both luxurious and properly touristy. I was flown to Barbados for a week where we only rehearsed for two hours a day. The rest of the time I was floating in a pool with a drink in my hand looking up at monkeys in tamarind trees, exploring huge fields of sugarcane, or swimming in the ocean, where I (at the risk of sounding like a compulsive liar) caught a ride on the back of a giant sea turtle once while I was snorkeling. I recently played a couple of shows overseas with my friend Rench's country hip-hop band - one in the UK and one in the Netherlands - and at the risk of sounding spoiled and patronizing, I was really looking forward to sleeping on dingy venue couches, surrounded by empty bottles and broken cymbals, balling up T-shirts from the merch table for pillows. But alas, to our surprise, we were escorted across the street to one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in in my life... the most embarrassing luxury of which was a Jacuzzi bathtub and a heated towel rack. None of us complained, though.

Roger: When you play live as Kono Michi, you tend to use classical musicians and write out most of the parts for them as musical notation. But you've had experience playing in rock type bands too in the early days, haven't you?

Michi: That turned out to be invaluable experience in terms of learning about technical things, just the nuts and bolts of being plugged in on stage, which was VERY foreign to me for a while. It still is sometimes. I'll introduce my violist to the sound guy before a sound check and it's like introducing a frog to a chipmunk. Sound guys tend to freak the hell out when they see a cello or a viola. "Why can't you just be a chick with a guitar?" is written all over their face.

Roger: Can you describe the pink milk bath promo video that you're working on?

Michi: The pink milk represents a self-constructed womb - an attempt to mimic and thus recapture the life-giving and nurturing environment we all took for granted as fetuses. It also represents the sea, a return to my childhood, to mother earth... but I'm also in danger of drowning which IRONICALLY represents taking that VERY life away! I'm totally kidding. I just like taking baths. Actually, the video will no longer be pink, but milky white. I discovered that the pink just made it look like I was hanging out in some water after just having been bitten by a shark.

KONO MICHI on MYSPACE

BROOKLYN INDIE NEWS NIBBLETS April 2008

BLOGGER: brooklyn news desk
LOCATION: brooklyn, new york
WEBSITE: sharkbatter.com
MYSPACE: myspace.com/sharkbatterrecords

Here's a video for Santogold's L.E.S. Artistes, with Santi White sounding a bit like Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I'm thinking:



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