As should seem pretty obvious, I’ve more or less neglected this thing since I set it up about six months back, or however long ago it was. I’d made a few posts but because I’d set the bar so high for myself by determining that I wasn’t going to post anything unless each and every paragraph was buffed to a mirror-like shine, and yet when I did think of something to write about, I just couldn’t buggered meeting those standards.

So I suppose I should lower the bar a bit and post more often, and hopefully whoever deigns to pop by for a read will tolerate the drivel. But we’ll see how that works out.

I’ve been playing an inordinate amount of computer games in the past little while – a modern computer and a Steam account does much to aid one’s consumption of such – so I’ll probably try and jot down a few impressions on those. I’ve kept on with putting together more music of my own, but that’s been kind of slow despite the acquisition of another synthesiser and whatnot, due to most of my energy being taken up by other areas, like the job. Cool synthesisers don’t pay for themselves!

Music as well. Obviously I’ve been doing that, but I think that last wrap-up was a little too wanky and I’ll probably be trying to base things off personal impressions rather than trying to write definitive reviews of such. With some exceptions, I also plan to write retrospective reviews on the careers of bands and artists that have interested me, so, yes, those will undoubtedly get a little pretentious.

I’m loathe to write anything about politics because, with the professional and amateur media churning out reams of half-baked analysis and navel-gazing editorials, it seems easier to link anything I’ve read that’s hit a nerve on the twitter feed. Let’s just say that I regard the current discourse around the polity with as about much regard as I have ever done, it’s just that I don’t think that throwing my two bobs worth in with all the other idiots is an effective use of my two bobs any more, especially when I could doing the other stuff mentioned above.

Though I will undoubtedly pop into the National Two-Up School from time to time when I’m sufficiently riled, given a little encouragement.

OK, maybe now I’ll finally concentrate into the original intent of this place, which was to write about my impressions about stuff, particularly music, though not limited to that, as the first couple of posts have indicated. I’ll kick off with some fairly recent releases from the past month or so, at other times I’ll be digging further back and more in depth but to start off with, here are some quick ones.

It’s been a while since The Orb – in effect Alex Paterson along with whoever is along for the ride at the time, which this time includes long-time crony Youth – have come out with anything particularly engaging. In my mind you’d have to go back to 1997′s Orblivion for that, so it was actually nice to put on Metallic Spheres and be teleported back into the sort of cosmic soundworlds Paterson and company were once so proficient at evoking. Having David Gilmour on board contributing guitar motifs throughout the album has a fair bit to do with that, while bringing a different feel to the Orb’s ’90s work with those other guitar experimentalists Steve Hillage on “The Blue Room” and Robert Fripp on the sadly out of print FFWD album. It almost goes without saying that the pairing makes utter sense considering The Orb’s Pink Floyd influences, and for the most part it delivers.

I guess if I do have a gripe about it, is that it stays in one gear for most of the album with a fairly steady beat, although there’s plenty of textural variation around it to keep things moving forward, without being too hasty about it. It does break down in the middle stages with some rootsy messing around from Gilmour being worked up into a deliciously airy stew – before you realise it, the pickwork has disappeared into the ether. At this point, I reckon that Paterson could probably step it up another notch and put out another truly great Orb album, but even so, Metallic Spheres is a fruitful collaboration in its own right. If you just want it as background music, it’ll work, but as with classic Orb (or Floyd, for that matter), this really works best on headphones or with your head between the speakers.

Youth also returns to the Killing Joke fold after the passing away of their other longtime bassist Paul Raven – remembered in “The Raven King” – to mark the third album since they reconvened early in the decade, albeit the first with the original lineup in a long while. Absolute Dissent might be a little more considered after the mayhem of Killing Joke and Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell, both of which made very strong claims for being their best in their thirty year history (golly!), but rest assured, the fires are still burning, Jaz is still Bonkers, and thus all is still right with the world (from a certain point of view).

The sound, as ever, is idiosyncratically Killing Joke, with a certain bombast yet without the gratuitous flourishes of metal. Industrial is where they have been traditionally pigeonholed, but to my mind, while there’s plenty of sturm und drang the collective sound is organic, ebbing and flowing, and explores different styles as is their wont, such as the vaguely motorik “European Super-State” or the dub flecks in “Ghosts Of Ladbroke Grove”. And did I mention Jaz Is Still Bonkers? Still switching between that growl and a less nodule-threatening baritone, his turn on “Here Comes The Singularity” pretty much sums it up. Why so serious?

Such a question has a different connotation for the Scottish institution Belle and Sebastian – they don’t write as many songs about eschatological horror, since for them the phrase “first world problems” entails something completely different. It’d been a while since their last album The Life Pursuit, while Stuart Murdoch put together the so-twee-it-makes-Jens-Lekman-look-like-Jaz-Coleman pop operetta God Help The Girl, which, while it worked in parts, came across as a bit Takin’ Over The Asylum* On Ice. Thus the release of the new album Write About Love (of course) came upon me unawares, since I figured the band must’ve been on an indefinite hiatus while Stu was doing that.

I will say it sounded a little underwhelming on the first listen, probably because I was judging it by their previous two albums when they actually decided to start to rock out a bit more after they’d mined the twee vein clean. But like those albums, there are surprises embedded within the songs that begin to ingratiate yourself on repeated listen. Take for instance, “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John”. Norah Jones pops up here, and her phrasing sounds a little out of place at first, having stormed in from your mother’s CD collection, but soon enough it makes itself at home. Typically, it’s about relationships.

With that in mind B&S also serves as an abbreviation for Bachelors and Spinsters, which in Australia tends to evoke images of rural folk in formal dress getting extremely muddy while watching their mates doing doughnuts half-plastered on rumbos and VB. But, decontextualise that phrase “bachelors and spinsters” out of that culture and you may see it as representing the mores of young (yet growing older) men and women trying to figure each other out and settling for compromises between what is known and what is unknown within relationships. In effect, while Belle and Sebastian may seem to newcomers to be overtly sentimental, while there is an element of that, it’s tempered enough by realism to give it a weight lacking in evidence in the likes of cinematic spakfilla such as Eat, Pray, Love.

(* You remember that show, it had Ken Stott as an alcoholic and David Tennant acting like a nutter – oh wait, they do that in just about everything.)

I spent several days at WorldCon in Melbourne, held this weekend past. It’s given me a lot to chew on and I pretty much had a hoot. If I had one regret it was deciding to leave my copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt out of my bags because in reflection I would’ve very much liked to have him sign it, but I’ll live. I did have a few other tragic fanboy moments that made up for that. This was also a talkfest, of course, so I also went to quite a few presentations and panel discussions, my musings upon which may form the basis of further posts here, even as the dust settles and the travelling authors and fans all recover from their jetlag.

One of the themes that popped up for me was, oddly enough, the impact of the introduction of rabbits to Australia. In at least a couple of his presentations, KSR mentioned such as he discussed the impact on human activity on the environment. And of course, another of the convention’s guests of honour, illustrator and artist Shaun Tan collaborated with John Marsden on the picture book The Rabbits, which runs with the idea as a metaphor for colonisation/invasion, which as Tan said some people did find confronting for what was a children’s book. I wonder if they might’ve had the same issues with Watership Down. (For a more heavy analysis, refer to “Who will save us from the rabbits?: rewriting the past allegorically“.)

This was not an all-pervading theme, but it was just something I noticed here and there during the course of the weekend. One can see the appeal to genre fiction writers of the fable of one person deciding in their homesickness to transport over an animal for the express purpose for a classic English hunt. Bearing in mind there were in fact assimilation societies who were kind of irked by all those marsupials and weird looking trees and decided that they needed to mould the ecology to be more like “home”, so if one nitwit didn’t do it, someone else might well have. What you learn from the past teaches you about the future.

So, it was a WorldCon. I came, I saw, I collapsed in a deceptively comfortable chair made out of recycled tyres. Aside from a heap of books and experiences – maybe even a sense of direction – I even managed to get regain some optimism out of it. Not that things are going to be easy in the next few decades, because there are no magic solutions; no walking deus ex machina with bad dress sense is going to step out of a box and set things right with a bloody sonic screwdriver. But at the same time, Robinson makes the point that we are likely to turn around and actually start putting a concerted effort into preventing letting things fall into complete collapse as we will have no other choice. If you have the inclination, I recommend take the time to listen to his Guest of Honour speech, which was covered in brief by Gary Kemble.

So, after an election campaign where nothing much was promised by either major party, with the ALP deciding they needed to reboot their leader after the old one crashed to the Blue Screen of Death, while the Liberals decided to reverted back to an earlier save with the old familiar boat theme as the desktop image.

The result really shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise when, in the last week with polls only just favouring the ALP even after they’d done everything in their power to become underdogs, while the Coalition kept things simple, in terms even a fifth-grader could understand, which is probably why they managed to get most of the media on board from about the beginning of the year, even those inveterate Trotskyists at the ABC got on top of the bandwagon with their brand new 24-hour recycled opinion channel, the first breaking story being, surprise, surprise, a damaging leak from bowels of the ALP.

It is probably just as well neither party can claim a mandate.

Though it was probably more by accident than design, the electorate have delivered both bands of clowns the perfect rebuke to twelve months of stupid politics, so it is really a relief that we have ended up with the balance of power being held by five individuals who seem to have demonstrated more sense than the Big Two. Even when you count Katter amongst that quintumvirate.

Assuming Hasluck falls to the Liberals and noting  that Greens’ MP Bandt has committed to give his vote of confidence to the ALP, this would balance up the numbers 73-73 before the independents make their choice. ALP policy such as the NBN would suit their electorates better than the bag of crap Abbott was offering the regions, while both Oakeshott and Windsor regard some sort of ETS as a priority, so they may try to convince the ALP to move faster on it rather than fob it off on that citizens assembly thing. On the other hand, it’s fair to say that some of their constituents may not be that pleased with that alignment, but I get the feeling Tony Windsor at least would be able to sooth those concerns in his electorate, and it is common knowledge how much they all hate the National Party establishment.

Lastly, the fact that nine Greens senators will be occupying the balance of power from July next week represents a problem for an Abbott government should he be given the nod. While he may try to gather double-dissolution triggers as a strategy to clear the impasse, this may be construed by the independents to being counter-productive to a stable government over three years. So we’ll wait and see what they decide.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy not having a proper government for a while. It’s times like these when Unca Donald’s words ring on, nearly fifty years after they were first penned.

A lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.

So say we all.

(An aside to finish off: The last thing I wanted to do when starting up weblogging after my break was to write about politics, since there are usually more interesting things to write about, but I guess this situation is actually pretty interesting. I’ll do the self-indulgent meta post about what I intend to do here in a few days, I suppose. Yes, the theme is terrible, it’s a work in progress. I decided I’d better hit the button and go public again before common sense prevailed on my part. So, hi guys, welcome to Rhythm and Knowledge.)