gigs coming up:
may: the national, broken social scene
june: mgmt, håkan hellström
july: björk
august: sigur rós (somewhere in europe)

listening to “unravel” by björk lots at the moment. i bought the album years ago (i think its currently at home in ireland in a press), i recently rediscovered the album and found myself obsessed by the music of unravel. its just astounding and hypnotic.

currently planning summer.

update:
may: ulrich schnauss
june: bonnie prince billy

in 2000 i inter-railed. i met an austrian girl in stockholms main train station as i was finishing up my few weeks. i told her about sigur rós and we swapped email addresses. a while later when sigur rós played in vienna the concert was recorded by austrian radio and broadcast. she taped it off the radio and sent the tape to me. as an introduction to the concert there was a simple piece of music played over the pa system. it was “für alina” by the estonian composer arvo pärt.

at one stage in this piece there was a noise by an audience member - i listened to it many many times trying to see if it was what i thought it was - a baby crying. so here i am now almost seven years later listening to the same song (this time a proper version) and i miss that little baby, keep expecting it to interrupt the delicate silence between the notes of the piano.

the first gig i saw at the iceland airwaves festival 2 weeks back was the icelandic band ultra mega technobandið stefán. in the space of about 30 minutes they rocked the venue - there was perhaps a hundred or so people there watching - about seven photographers up the front with very expensive cameras moshing along with the singer and taking thousands of pictures. the singers stripped off and was jumping around the place as his father was taping it all on video camera. the energy of the gig was just amazing.

photoset from their pravda gig on 2006.10.18: here

here are some youtube links: “cockpitter” + interview (in icelandic) + “story of a star”

they played a second gig on the sunday night in another venue - we had heard it was due to start at 0100 so we got to the venue at just before 0100 only to find out that they had started a little after 0000 - so we only got to see the last 2 minutes of (i think) cockpitter (see video above) which had four or five band members moshing in with the audience. (oh plus they are aged only 16 or something)

gets darker earlier these days - a little nip in the air - the ground has some brown leaves on it. listening to max richter - fantastic stuff.

hurrah! rté are gonna broadcast some of electric picnic online next weekend.

was listening to a stream of dara and baz dj’ing on power fm the other day - they played one song by group called “burial”. i got their latest album and its simply astounding. unbelievable stuff.

bleep.com mp3 + flac purchase link

lots and lots of people taking pictures at the two concerts last week - the screens of camera phones and small digicams was lighting up the audience like lighters held aloft at a scorpions concert. i tried to take similar pics at the mew concert here a few weeks back - but it wasnt as succesful.

just got back from mew - they were pretty great. i took my camera with me and took lots of pics, here are some.

great concert last night. more pictures here: /kuva/2004.09.kings_of_convenience