What with secret theo gigs and those freaky aint it black dudes, there seem to be loads of good parties on at the moment. One that deserves special mention is manny’s celebration of all things 808, nitefreq.

There’s a great line-up, Arthur Baker/808 State/DMX Krew and the artwork is, as you would expect, typically strong. Most of all though (and this isn’t something you can usually say) the best thing about this night is the date.

See you down Jacks a week on Friday.

(more details here)

What’s with the Guardian’s relentless coverage of the final season, I’m getting dangerously close to Wire overload. I need to chill-ax and come back fresh in a year or so, start from scratch, take my time.

When I do, I’ll also be visiting jurgen fauth’s wire linkathon-but right now I just can’t take it.

Whatever happened to the Channel 4 I used to love?

More often than not these days, it feels like I’m watching a series of 5 minute ‘filler items’ from daytime TV, extended into morbidly brainless 30 minute chunks. The fact that I help fund this tripe, via my license fee, is bad enough without having to pay for dastardly, misleading ‘documentaries’ made by bullshit peddling idiots desperately serving their own agendas at the expense of everyone else on the planet.

Thankfully, there are people like George Monbiot around to put them straight.

Critics like me recognise that Channel 4 is entitled to its own opinions. But it is not entitled to its own facts. As a public service broadcaster it does not have the right to manipulate graphs, invent histories, alter scientific evidence or produce a film which, in the words of one of its contributors, was “as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two”

A three part takedown by a man who also knows a thing or two about anger and verbosity.

Part 1/2/3

Talking of Theo, San Miguel have been in touch and apparently he’ll be playing next week as part of their excellent ‘Hidden Depths‘ season of events. The ‘secretsundaze‘ hosted night takes place at the T bar, Shoreditch and is free to get in via a ‘register and get a chance to win’ type thing at the Hidden Depths website.

Should be a great session, if only to see if anyone turns up from PRS
to make sure he’s paying royalties an all those ugly edits of his. There’s a chromeo one in a few weeks as well, so we’ll definitely be checking that out also.

As with all these things, there’s a fine line between corporate sponsorship and having your culture sold back to you as branded lifestyle, but this seems to have the support of some genuine people (not least theo) so it seems reasonable to give the guys the benefit of the doubt.

(oh and it’s free parties, in some great venues, with some serious artists-what’s not to love!)

Underground dance music, which is not controlled by the industry directly, is where we exist, but also have a lot of control, because to get music out we have to start our own labels usually. But the copying goes on here the worst. We don’t have a lot of protection against thieves because their aren’t a lot of lawyers, because there’s usually just enough money for the artists to survive on, unless you helped father the form. There aren’t managers suggesting to artists to do white versions of black songs, but there are white artists with labels doing it on their own. This is one of the few places a thief will try to copy your music, then send it to you calling it a tribute in hopes of you endorsing it. They’ll find the sources of your samples if you use them, and use them verbatim, then try to cash in on your previous successes.

Theo’s music and deejaying, which I love, are quite clearly fed by his radical, uncompromising stance. It’s not just that it sounds different, has a feeling and agenda all of it’s own, but also it comes from a place I don’t know or understand. That’s the attraction (as it’s always been) you are either drawn to the comfort of home and the things you know or in the opposite direction. And if you’re leaving home, you should expect to hear things that you don’t want to and meet people who you disagree with, but can also challenge you to think about things in a different way. Theo’s gonna draw alot of heat from this interview, and perhaps rightly so, alot of people who support the man (financially or otherwise) might feel that they are implicated in the racial conspiracy he sees at the root of the music industry.

Either way, it’s the stance and the attitude that make the man (and so the music) and I would rather be surrounded by a music and culture that challenges and provokes than one that flatters me.

Read the full interview here.

***Further debate and comments including one from the man himself here*****

Still a little skeptical-but less so after seeing this.

Season 5 of The Wire is about debut on TV in the UK, so there is a mini-deluge of articles about hl’s fav, including this one on the role of architecture in the show.

It’s been a crazy few days for anyone with a passing interest in the iphone. Indeed with one million sold over the weekend (and 10 million apps) it seems like the revolution which started last year has broken into the mainstream.

There is a fair amount of general apple cynicism in various quarters, not least the amongst certain sections of the PC brigade who can’t see what all the fuss is with Apple and are quick to see ‘Apple-hype’ and generally ‘Mac cult-ishness’ at the root of the massive amount of media attention garnered on these sort of occasions. What amazes me is the lack of Apple generated hype behind last weekend’s launch, and the fact that it’s actually primarily customer generated. Think about that for a second. Apple had a $200 million (?) opening weekend and I’ve hardly seen a poster or an ad.

It’s obvious that price and/or 3G was the deal breaker for some, but it’s really the Apps that are the important thing to watch here. How many times have you ever said ‘check this out’ and showed someone something amazing on your phone ? I’d say before the iphone perhaps 3 or 4 times-now it’s an almost dailyoccurrence-and that’s before we’ve really got into apps.

It’s been perhaps 3 months since the majority of programmers got their hands on the SDK, so it’s very early days and already incredible programs like intua’s SICK looking Beatmaker are starting to appear. The video above is Moocowmusic’s stand alone Drummer, Art Gillespie (the guy behind Idrum)has a drum machine coming out next week (i-idrum?) and we’ve yet to hear from any of the traditional big boys of music software (iphone reason or iphone ableton anyone?). Beat making on the tube has just gone mainstream!! Imagine how many people I’m going bugging with iphone related ‘wow’ moments now. I’m going to become a walking apple viral campaign (as are 10 million other people). A friend who works for a very forward looking marketing company told me recently that his company’s philosophy now is to tell clients to spend their massive marketing budgets on making better products. Chat rooms and forums, blogs and amazon product ratings arejust way too effective at cutting through PR bullshit-it’s just wasted money.

It’s been said before, people underestimate Apple’s brand dominance within the 15-35 demographic (been to an Apple store recently?) this is going to have an exponential affect within that market. As deejay, I’m waiting for the Technics Ideck or the Serato IScratch to become the new default deejay tool -and there are million niche professions that the right bit of software could just completely open up. It has the hardware and now it has the software, (the Core Location side of which is still to be even vaguely explored) and as the political world knows only too well, more than anything else ‘It’s all about the Mo’. Apple has that momentum now and as long as they don’t go out of their way to screw it up-the world is theirs for the taking. Nintendo seem to be the main competitors in this field, depending on what they decide to do with the DS-Nokia/RIM/Google must be absolutely terrified that this is a race they have already lost.

***Update*** CDM has an interview with Intua, the makers of Beatmaker and a demo here- I downloaded it last night and I’m impressed. It’s very much like an MPC for the iphone-can’t wait to load it up with my own sounds and see where this goes. Go take a look!

Can’t wait to see this.

Olt Aicher’s complete set of posters for the Munich Olympics from the flickr set of design shop blanka.

via coudal