It's been on the cards for a long time, but London's Astoria has finally closed. Pretty much every rock music follower in the South East must have memories from there. My own favourites, for what it's worth both, revolve around Mike Patton: the extraordinary Mr Bungle Californa gig (unquestionably the best gig I've ever seen - or am likely to see) and, a couple of years on (a more specific moment, this), a Tomahawk encore during which Patton pissed in a great arc right over the audience. Anyway, our memories aside, the closure is a genuine outrage. Central London will now effectively have no large scale rock venue; The Scala frankly sucks, the Roundhouse is a bit too heritage, a bit arts venue, and the Brixton Academy, for all it's a great venue is, well, hardly a central London venue. So it's all a bit shit really. No change there then.
On the Patton front, by the way, rumours aboud at the moment of a FNM reunion... really, they do.
Now, talking of disappointment, or at least its potential... Can this possibly live up to the hype, or indeed, to the trailer:
I caught the trailer in the cinema this weekend, ahead of the spectacularly execrable Spirit; the three minutes it lasted were beyond doubt the best we experienced in there. It's been pointed out to me that the music pretty much makes the trailer, but then that's a weirdly seamless mash-up of Philip Glass and Muse... whereas the film's score is by Tyler Bates, who doesn't seem much to write home about so there's already potential mishap there. (I gather that a more recent trailer features a Smashing Pumpkins score... they're going after Gen X with a vengeance on this one... )
And the film seems to be running into some serious difficulties even before release... so let's see...
A couple of people have pointed me at this pretty amusing map of metal names. I was especially taken with "Pointless Misspelling" (Def Leppard, take a bow) and "Umlauts".
Also on the metal front, I've been enjoying the Meshuggah-based ruminations of Ross Edwards on his blog Behold the .... Part-cultural studies essay, part-aesthetic philosophy, it features such gem-like apercus as "Engaging works directly as sound is something that must be practiced in order to successfully overcome the programming provided by a society in which music theory is the top educational priority." Quite.
Props to Gizmodo US for alerting us to the wonderful faintly sci-fi, religious-icon-meets-military-tech-by-way-of Warhammer-40K sculptures and bas-reliefs of Kris Kuksi.
There's a bunch of stuff over on the Double Shot blog I share with Justin including some nice thoughts from J on classical music and comms tech and on what Clay Shirky terms Cognitive Surplus (read it - all will become clear) plus a bunch of media/music/tech round-ups from me...
Oh, and in a shameless familial plug, my son Franck's electronica project Figit goes from strength to strength, and in a slightly new direction with every third track or so. As ever, there's a bunch of new stuff on his MySpace page.
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