One of my favourite Beijing-based musicians, Jess Meider is great listening, just guitar and a great soulful voice that dips in and out on smartly penned numbers she’s put together in hang-outs down Beijing’s old hutong alleyways. She was down there the other night, at Yuggong Yishan to play some of her new songs. Take a listen to my favourite, So Simple, a simple acoustic job like the title suggests, on her Myspace page.

 

I often wonder why Beijing, for all its traffic grid-lock and ugly high rises, is such a magnet for creative westerners, who find form here. From small-town America, Meider teaches yoga in the daytime and plays gigs at night, and on Sunday afternoon jazz in several bands around town. This Berklee School graduate became a founder member of Junglecat when she moved to Beijing to learn Mandarin. Another one of those great Beijing experiences/existences and it’ll be worth going to her next gig, on August 26 at Luce Café, in hutong-land, Gulou.

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My Bloody Valentine, Deerhunter and Tortoise (live at La Route du Rock, St Malo, France) Review Snapshot: Three cult acts share an impressive bill on the Breton coast. The excellent Deerhunter con...

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There’s opportunities for a “black man” on China’s live music scene, according to several ads appearing in recent editions of The Beijinger. The ads, which were placed by TaipingYang Eight, an agency that arranges gigs for ‘world’ music performers across China, promises RMB500 (less than EUR50) per gig and travel outside Beijing and China.

                                                     Good work if you can get it: a car show in China

Now EUR50 a gig isn’t a fortune but if there’s a visa and housing involved – as is often offered by Chinese employers – it might be okay work for a travelling musician. Aside from the ‘positive discrimination’ overtones of the ad – Chinese people have referred to Europeans, not maliciously, as ‘big noses’ and Russians as ‘old hairies’ – but rather the circuit that the successful applicant will find himself on: token foreigner playing supermarket openings, restaturants and beer festivals around China, with stops to play provincial TV shows. I’ll be looking out for TaipingYang Eight.

 

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The way people listen to music has changed, with the advent of the download the emphasis has reverted to single tracks. It hasn't helped that most people have forgotten how to make a decent album. I'm constantly disappointed with records I buy. - Tim Wheeler - Ash

None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again - Thom Yorke - Radiohead

I think a lot. It comes with the territory when you spend the majority of your days with just a dog with a personality disorder for company.  Recently I've been thinking a lot about the album as a format and, inspired by Aidan's thread on the subject earlier this week, I decided it was about time I blogged about it. 

To understand why I feel the way I do about the album it is important to understand that I see music the same way I see art or literature and it is my contention that the realisation of an idea - as opposed to greed or, worse still, a hunger for fame - should be the main driving force behind the creation of art. It is for this reason that I would hate to see the death of the album as a format.  Singles might well be the lifeblood of music, but long players are its soul. 

Maybe it's just me but you build relationships with an album in a way you can't with singles.  To put it in very earthy terms, singles might well be worth a quickie every now and then on her mates couch but something in the back of your mind tells you that an album is probably worth getting to know a little better first.  As I write this blog I'm listening to one of my favourite ever albums, Elliot Smith's eponymous sophomore album.  It took me many listens to fall in love with this record, it certainly wasn't love at first listen, but there were enough individual songs on it that I liked to keep me coming back for more and now there isn't a song on it I don't like or, more importantly, feel the album would be better off without.  Elliott Smith is just one of many albums that I feel this way about.

It's not just about the music of course.  I love the feeling of buying a new album.  I love getting it home and struggling to take it out of its plastic packaging.  I love trying to peel off the price sticker without leaving any residue on the case.  I love checking out the artwork and reading the lyrics.  I love studying the sleeve notes and discovering that someone I know 'in real life' was involved in someway or was thanked by the band.  I love reorganising my entire CD/Record collection to some new filing system I've thought of in the pub (alpha-geographical is still my favourite).  I love the whole multi-sensory experience you get from owning an album on CD or Vinyl Record.  Compare that to 'right click, play'.  It's just not the same.

Of course, not every album makes me feel this way, but that's a matter of taste isn't it? I'm absolutely sure that there isn't an album on the market today that someone, somewhere, doesn't feel the same way as I do about Elliott Smith, Clouds Taste Metallic or Deserter's Songs.  I know I'm being terribly idealistic, but shouldn't great music, like all great art, be idealistic.  Is it too much to ask for bands to put more emphasis on making music than making profit?  Don't kill the album for the sake of keeping Steve Jobs in black polo necks.  There is a place for singles, there always has been and there always will be.  The prominence of downloads has altered our perspective but, as blogs haven't killed novels or Banksy hasn't stopped people attending art galleries, their place should be alongside the physical album, not instead of it.

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Welcome to La Route du Rock, France's best alternative music festival. We're at the site, an old fort about ten miles south of Saint Malo. To get here - and Irish festival-goers will love this - a free shuttle takes us from the town out to the festival location. And en route it stops at a hypermarket where one can get off the bus, load up on supplies (booze, mostly) and then hop on the next bus a half-hour later.

We've been struck by the number of English accents we've heard around us here - it seems that there's been a mini D-Day channel crossing and landing. Of course, the cheap tickets, easy accessibility and excellent line-up make this a great value indie-kid holiday for UK fans. With transport connections from Ireland to nearby Rennes (by air) and Paris, La Route du Rock is a secret that Irish fans would do well to discover.

Just like last year, festival director François Floret has been playing the poor mouth and telling the press about the financially precarious situation of La Route du Rock. That said, even he concedes that next year's festival is not at all in danger - a change in tone from the end-of-the-world sounds he made by rattling his begging bowl last summer. But the festival's unique venue is part of the problem - from a total budget of €1.3 million, a hefty €700,000 is spent on installing and customising the technical side of things.

And that leaves little in the piggy bank for paying rock stars. Floret singles out the expense of bringing the Irish headliners to the festival. "My Bloody Valentine proved to be rather demanding", he told local paper Ouest France. Eventually, he says, because of the festival's reputation "they accepted to half their appearance fee". Oh, but they're worth it, monsieur Floret.

Tonight's bill features Deerhunter, Tortoise, A Place To Bury Strangers, Crystal Stilts and headliners My Bloody Valentine - review to follow.

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 I spent a great few hours in London lately at the School of Oriental & African Studies on Russell Square. I’d seen a note about the onsite Brunei Gallery’s show on Kazakh carpet making – or rather, felt carpet making by ethnic Kazakhs in Mongolia. Small in scale and excellently explained and curated, complete with yurt, the exhibition also opened my eyes to the work being done at SOAS on Central Asian music. Leaflets at the Brunei alerted me to a new double CD of Kazakh music produced by the School. It’s a collection of masters of Central Asian instruments like the dombra. But they’ve also found performers of the pobyz, “the two-stringed fiddle with shamanic roots” and the sybyzghy, an open-ended flute “amplified by a vocal drone.”

The 44-track collection is intended as a musical journey across vast, sparsely populated Kazakhstan. Hence the qobyz tunes were picked up in the country’s southern and central plains while there’s “virtuoso” dombra playing from eastern and western settlements on the steppe, as the vast grasslands are known. I was happy that the Kazakh embassy in London seems to have pitched in with SOAS and the Art & Humanities Research Council to release the collection, which I’m dying to hear in its entirety. That’s good to see, because the totalitarian regimes who’ve run most central Asian states for decades have never been renowned for their preservation of traditional local culture, certainly not during the USSR years of Russification.  You can buy the CD at the SOAS bookshop, nextdoor to the Brunei Gallery.

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Being play-listed on BBC Radio One, an album recorded in France with a top class producer (David Odlum- The Frames, Gemma Hayes), glowing critical praise; after eight years together Pocket Promise are...

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If you have US$20 to spend on some chinoserie, you could do worse than a t-shirt by Plastered, a UK-owned design house in Beijing that's thrived as a cottage industry-sized producer of t-shirts bearing images of local iconic brands (like local cheap spirits maker ErGouTou) and old signage.

The firm, whose shop in the old-city neighbourhood of Nanluoguxiang, was inundated with Olympics tourists this time last year, will likely do well with its t-shirt boasting the name and doodles of PK14, one of the most enduing of Sino-Swedish joint ventures and long-term staple of the local punk scene.

 

 

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The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart (live in The Biltmore Cabaret, Vancouver) Review Snapshot: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart put on a great show, marred only slightly by some odd song choices. The...

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Cois Fharraige, Ireland's number one music and water sports festival, returns to Kilkee, Co. Clare this September.  The 3 day event will take place between Friday September 11 and Sunday September 13.

Previous incarnations of the festival has seen performances from the likes of Seasick Steve, Supergrass, Travis and The Futureheads.  So far only a few acts for the 2009 edition have been announced but include the likes of Noah & The Whale, Doves, The Hold Steady and The Zutons.

Tickets went on sale this morning (Tuesday August 11) from the usual outlets and are available at an early bird price of 89euro (inc. booking fee) until September 1.  After that, the price becomes 99euro (also inc. booking fee).

Unlike other festivals, there is no on-site camping available but punters can check out the Discover Ireland website to see what accommodation is available in the surrounding areas. 

Doves: Kingdom of Rust

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