I was talking yesterday with Bob Youill, Hong Kong policeman turned investigator at Asia Risk, the firm which chases down counterfeiters for clothes and music corporations. The Hong Kong-based company has been working for the recording industry across Asia, tracking down criminal gangs making and smuggling counterfeit CDs.

Most of it happens in China, says Bob, only because there’s the capacity here for making CDs. CDs are churned out in China and shipped to other countries that don't have such CD manufacturing capacity. Most of the CD factories are set up by Taiwanese investors, who shifted plants from Taiwan and Malaysia to cut costs. Youill told me of an Asia Risks bust in November 2007: working with the Royal Malaysian Police working operatives raided three illegal optical disc manufacturing plants.

They recovered six multi-million dollar replication lines, several hundred infringing master copies and thousands of infringing optical discs containing both popular music and Hollywood movies. "At the third plant, the owners were caught attempting to remove a replication line in a heavy goods vehicle. The illegal factories were part of the same organized crime syndicate and the illegal discs were destined for both local Malaysian and overseas markets."

With countries like Malaysia cleaning up its act the action is moving to mainland China. Still, CD piracy is down on previous years, says Youill - "only because the action has moved onto the Internet."

So forget tiny, undergroudn workshops: counterfeiting is big-factory business in China, where piracy is rarely seen by police as a major crime.

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Mr. Scruff (live in the Black Box, Galway)

Review Snapshot: Galway city, June Bank Holiday weekend, a sky full of sun, a bottle of bucky, Mr. Scruff and a couple of friends; the winter is over, and life is good again.

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10

Full Review:
Last time I saw Mr. Scruff was at the Tony Allen gig in Crawdaddy last year, but because of Mr Allen’s afrobeat sensation, and the free mojitos outside, I didn’t really get to see much Scruff. What I had seen, however, had been something fresh. As we sat in the bar about nine o’clock sipping our drinks, he was playing soft chill out, laid back beats perfect for the start of the night. When I came back in a couple of hours later, buzzing off the closest I will ever be to Fela Kuti, he was spinning funk, klezmer and afrobeat to a room full of the demented. Hot damn. This weekend I was looking forward to five hours of solo-scruff loving.

As a DJ, Mr. Scruff is damn impressive. The breadth of his musical palette is phenomenal, and he manages to own all genres. Not dipping in and out, with the ebb and flow of fashion, but appreciating them, owning them, and moulding them into his vision. From funk to reggae, trance to ambient, to soul and indie, nothing seems forced, nothing is quirky for quirkiness’ sake. The ability to keep a crowd in the palm of his hand for five plus hours, while building a set from chill out to full on hoolie… I guess its easy when you know how.

I’ve never been to the Black Box, and God knows what it would be like for a band, but for a DJ it is perfect: A huge cavernous space, plenty of room to throw yourself about, and cheap cans at the bar. For the black hole that the best sets can be, it couldn’t be better.

Something that got me about the night was the difference to a traditional gig. This was an all night show, much more like a club with great tunes than any live spectacle, and it was one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time. I don’t know why, but it seems much easier to just turn off and enjoy without the visual attraction of a band to distract you. There were only two problems with the gig, some uncharacteristically dodgy visuals (Galway, Oranmore, Spanish Arch… eh a little lame?) and a virtual, and equally uncharacteristic absence of the funk.

They are minor quibbles though, and the set was so good, it is hard to nitpick. In fact the only let down came right at the end, in the overwhelming oddness of the last, encore, tune. After whipping the crowd into a mad trad-infused climaz, the encore was The Cure’s Love Cats, a great tune, sure, but not for the time and place.

Eclectic, enjoyable and ridiculously infectious, Mr. Scruff puts on one hell of a good show, and five hours of solid bogey is better than any gym.

Nice.

Very nice.

 Daragh Murray

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Irish indie bands and music videos haven't always been the happiest of bedfellows. 

'Here lads, do you know what would be deadly; if we recorded ourselves buskin' on Grafton Street, that'd be original' seemed to be as far as most bands would stretch. 

However, the technology involved in making decent videos is becoming cheaper and more and more bands are using the medium as an extension of their music. 

With this in mind, Key Notes today launches a new feature which will bring you new and interesting videos released by Irish indie bands - CLUAS Music Television.

Today's video is from the Future Kings of Spain.  The track, Syndicate, taken from the Nervousystem album, normally extends to over 8 minutes, but for its release as a single in July it has been cut to half that.  The video, directed by Joshua Sachs, was filmed by Ivan McCullough and students from The Tisch Film School in New York as part of the HotPress/Tisch Film School program.  It was shot over two days in Inchicore, Dublin 8. 

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Meet Mr. Zhou Xiaochuan, general manager of Guangzhou Starsing Culture Co. Ltd. That's the label whose release for soft-pop mistress Liang Jingru sold 200,000 units, making it one of the best selling albums of 2007.

Like most Chinese label bosses, he’s shifting he’s less worried about pirates than he is by downloads: “We bear more pressures form Internet downloads.” It’s in CD sales however that Zhou is really thinking outside the box: worried by what he sees as the reduction in numbers of shops selling original CDs he’s looking into distribution deals with “cafes, flower shops and many other places.”

Pop music accounts for between 20%-30 percent of Starsing’s catalogue. Zhou is "open" to music of different styles: the label has licensed classical, jazz and country music from foreign labels. Zhou’s marketing staff targets the 18-36 age bracket, “especially those with higher education backgrounds.”

Starsing started to cooperate with foreign musicians at the end of last year, pressing CDs locally for singers from France, Spain, Malaysia and Sweden. “We have cooperated a lot with Sony, from which we get a clear picture of foreign music.”

Not all of the label's money is coming in recording deals. The label signed contract for image rights and merchandising management with four artists. Starsing also took a cut from organizing concerts for Jiang Xin at Beijing club Starlive. The label is organizing a July 5 concert for Dou Wei, Zhang Chu, He Yong and Jiang Xin, also a Starlive.

Starsing can compete with the multinationals on home turf: Compared with companies like Warner and EMI we firmly rooted in the Chinese land, we know more about the local culture and we are much more flexible. Those big companies are aircraft carriers and we are just like a small boat. The air craft carrier can never navigate in China’s inner rivers as freely as a small boat.”

Frequent managerial shuffles also hobbles the majors in China. “That’s not good for continuity of their market strategy whereas we can implement our strategy more consecutively.” Zhou also thinks he beats multinationals by knowing the local Internet and retail scenes inside out. “We studied thoroughly about state of different media, the situation of the Internet’ development and data of sale terminals in cities at various levels in China... they cannot compete with us in this area.”

Government crackdowns on counterfeiters can have unintended effects on labels. “Pirate CDs are a problem, but not the biggest one. “It’s harder than ever to get a license to sell audio and video products, so that means less outlets for legitimate CDs too,” says Mr. Zhou.  Starsing battles pirates in the courts. “Anti-pirate technology will raise the cost and will eventually be broken by those pirates.”

Starsing has image and merchandising management deals with four mainland Chinese artists. The company’s concert management wing organized shows for Jiang Xin at Starlive in Beijing and is preparing for a Beijing show in July by Jiang and fellow folk singers Dou Wei, Zhang Chu, He Yong.

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So, the rate of Irish acts visiting Paris has slowed to one per month. Not to worry - June's tourist is worth a calendar-full.

Jape, nom de rock of Richie Egan, plays the Flèche d'Or on Monday 2 June. Even though lundi soir is usually tumbleweed night at our favourite Paris gigspot, it should be a cracking show.

Egan has just released his third Jape album, 'Ritual', an exciting mix of up-for-it indietronica and downbeat bedsit-pop.

After his Paris visit Egan will be touring the no-less-glamorous towns of Ireland. That Future Days show with Dan Deacon at Vicar Street in Dublin on June 14 seems unmissable.

Jape will then be appearing at Glastonbury, no less. You can find full details of Egan's movements at the Jape MySpace page.

Here's the brilliant first single 'Ritual', 'I Was A Man', recorded for the Airfield Sessions on Channel 6. The line "I popped my cherry to 'November Rain'" deserves to be on the Leaving Cert English paper:

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Back at the beginning of May CLUAS relaunched its email newsletter. The first newsletter I must say was a bit of a stab in the dark, considering it was four years since CLUAS had sent out its last newsletter and in the intervening period newsletters have fallen to the wayside a bit as a means for people use to get info from or on websites (especially with the rise of RSS feeds and social networking sites). Nonetheless, call me a traditionalist or whatever, I still think a newsletter can still play a valuable role for extending the reach of CLUAS.

To get our newsletter out CLUAS is using the services of YMLP.com (Your Mailing List Provider) a well established and trustworthy third party for sending out newsletters (for those who wonder why we don’t just send it out ourselves using normal email software I should point out that a third party is really needed for newsletters with several thousand subscribers as sending such a number of emails in one go is no trivial matter with the growing number of restrictions ISPs have put in place to combat email spam). Anyways, I digress...

One of the interesting additional services these YMLP guys offer are detailed stats on how many people clicked on a link in the newsletter to reach CLUAS and what links were the most popular. As I like my numbers I thought I’d indulge a bit and provide some details below on what these stats threw up for the first CLUAS newsletter in four years.

The first thing I was looking out for after I hit the ‘send’ button for the newsletter was how many of the 6025 email addresses we had in our subscriber list would still be active and how many would were dead. Considering some of our subscribers emails went back to 1999 my guess was that about half of them would be dead addresses. I was surprised to see that just 30% of the addresses turned out to be the virtual equivalent of a black hole (of the original 6025 only 1834 addresses turned out to be totally dead, and were automatically removed from the mailing list). Of the remaining 4191 email addresses an additional 216 bounced back to us with what they call a 'soft bounce' (e.g. the recipient's mailbox was full). Such soft bounces will only be removed from our mailing list if there are 3 consecutive 'soft' bounces. All in all of the original 6025 a grand total of 3975 newsletters were delivered. The number of people who choose to unsubscribe was a very low figure: only 33 people unsubscribed (less than 1% of the newsletters delivered).

But how many people who received the newsletter bothered to open it and of those how many chose to click on a link in the newsletter to visit CLUAS? It is actually impossible to get accurate stats on how many people opened a newsletter (for a variety of valid reasons I won't bore you with here) but these YMLP guys provide us with accurate stats on the number of links in a newsletter that were clicked on. They were able to determine that a total of 462 links in the newsletter were clicked by those who read it. The most popular links that were clicked were:

• The review of Gemma Hayes live in Dublin (52 visits)
• The link to the CLUAS 'Gigs of the Fortnight' section (27 visits)
• The blog entry about the reviving the CLUAS newsletter (25 visits)
• (the remaing 358 clicks were spread over the 32 other links that were in the newslteter)

The accuracy of the 462 links clicked in the newsletter I do not doubt and, at a first glance, it seems quite low for an email received by almost 4000 subscribers. However you need to dig a bit deeper to understand the full picture. The visitor analysis software used by CLUAS.com (the Google Analytics service) revealed that someone clicking on one of those links in the newsletter went on to view an average of was 3.3 pages on CLUAS. This means that those 462 clicks generated just over 1500 'page views'. Still, not massive number for a mailing received by 4000 subscribers. But my guess is that among those who chose to click a link in the newsletter there were many who would not have visited the site in a long time and, hopefully having liked what they saw, some of them will become more regular visitors to the site. It is this difficult to measure aspect of a newsletter's impact that is an important part of its real value, even if RSS feeds and the like are - for some - a more modern way to get updates on the latest stuff happening on a website.

I'll be looking out to see if this sort of figure (1500 page views, for an email received by 4000 people) holds up with our future newsletters. I guess my better judgement will again take a walk and I will end up blogging about it. You can start groaning now.

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Motley Crue are one of those bands who, if they were a surfer would be aerial pioneer Christian Fletcher. Sound Waves likes Christian Fletcher (pictured right), he is an antidote to all the beads, beards and ganja smoking Bali regulars. Christo is, in short a bad MoFo.

As a result, Sound Waves also loved 'The Dirt' and when we heard the boys in Crue (who look like they were separated at birth from Christo) were going to, in effect, transform it into a concept album of sorts, well, we were stoked to say the least. The title is to be decided and the release is slated for June. Happy days.

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Times New Viking (live in Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin)

Review Snapshot: Times New Viking played to small crowd on a Monday night. They gave it everything though. They were trashy, noisy and superb.

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10

Full Review:

Times New Viking released their third album 'Rip It Off' to much fanfare in blogs and, most importantly, Pitchfork. Being signed to Matador had not caused them to change their sound away from their lofi home-recording beginnings on the Stillbreeze label. Instead 'Rip It Off' is like early Pavement going punkier. It's so noisy that it almost gives you a headache. Importantly though, it sounds great.

So, on Monday night they brought their noise to Ireland. It was my first time in the new Andrew's Lane Theatre. It is a decent well designed venue, even if the artwork on the wall makes the place seem as though it's screaming out to be accepted by the Dublin 'scene'.

The gig started with little ceremony. The 'roadies' just picked up their instruments, tuned up, and started playing. I had wondered how well they could translate the sound they create on record to their live performance. Would they have to employ an incompetent soundman? Whatever they did, they captured the sound of the album brilliantly. The vocals were drowned out and the music was fuzzy. It sounded great.

With each track clocking in around the 1-2 minute mark, they fitted 20 songs into their short set. Highlights were 'Teen Drama' and '(My Head)', but many were so indistinguishable behind the raucous noise that it was hard to tell which track they were playing! Regardless of that, it was fast and it was fun.

After just 40 minutes, it was over. Drummer Adam Elliott headed outside for a smoke with the fans, while Beth sat on the stage talking to the fans. The guitarist just stood on stage and finished off the bottle of Jameson that the 3 of them had made impressive progress on during the gig.

There was no pomp about this band. There was no showmanship.There were no frills. They came on stage, made wonderful noise and left. And that's what Times New Viking are all about.

Garret Cleland

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Imagine if Podge & Rodge or Dustin were funny. Not just vulgar but funny too. Well, Fur TV manages to not only be far more vulgar than either the Ballydung brothers or that wizened bird but gosh darn funny too. Here is Fat Ed's guide to metal...

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