Tuesday, March 3, 2009

I've Got Falling and Laughing (Falling and Laughing, Falling and Laughing...)

As I've mentioned before, I contribute regularly to an online Radio Station called dublab.com. I've also mentioned that I am in the process of putting together an indiepop related themestream for the station. Two sessions have just been added to the dublab archive that will eventually be added to that very themestream.

The idea was brought about somewhat by a comment that was left on Hungry Beat's Myspace page (before we had even held our first night) by our friend Krister who used to put on a similar night in Malmo, Sweden. He noticed that we were on the same night each month, and that we should look into doing virtual guest DJ sets. I mentioned this on Hungry Beat! night one to dublab Ale, and he brought up the idea of the themestream. At the rate that I am going in terms of actually compiling these things, this theme will likely be in place by early 2015. I'm kidding, of course, I hope to have it all worked out over the course of this year. So far I've been thrilled by the diversity of ideas that I've been presented with as I've been reaching out to people, and putting this all together.

So far (fairly appropriately I think) my favorite session has come from the person whose comment set this idea into motion. I don't know how many people when approached about creating an indiepop session would automatically think to create a history of noisy guitar music that traces the threads from James Chance to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. This is precisely what Kris has done for us though, and it sounds fantastic. I made the possible mistake of listening to it for the first time while walking around my neighborhood. I had to remind myself (more than once) that mouthing along the words to a Go Sailor song while taking such a walk is not quite appropriate, and probably made me appear to be mentally ill. Still a set good enough to make me momentarily forget societal norms surely must be good for making an hour of work pass by more quickly. You can (and should) listen to that set here.

Also new to the archive is a set that I contributed with my friend Allan Kingdom who was the guitarist for this band. If you don't currently own that Siddeleys retrospective that was my not so subtle way of hinting that you should. Naturally I asked Allan to put together a set for the pop themestream that I was working on, and it was his idea that it would be more fun to turn that into an installment of my show (Not Quite Punk) and carry on a conversation in tribute to Orange Juice. What it turned out to be is Allan filling us in on a lot of obscure Orange Juice history that I wouldn't even know where to begin to search for otherwise, and demonstrating connections to other bands and songs that influenced them. My role as it turns out was to come across as a silly fangirl, and say, "Wow..." a lot. Anyway, excluding my contributions, the set is very informative, and contains several live performances, and radio sessions that you are not too likely to find to easily anywhere else. Listen to that set here.

There is talk of extending this set into an overall Postcard Records of Scotland tribute, with a Josef K/Aztec Camera session next, and then a Go-Betweens set to round things out. There are several other label tributes that I am attempting to organize, I will naturally do my best to keep you posted as these take shape.

3 comments:

Daniel Novakovic said...

Allans Orange Juice history lesson was absolutely amazing. Somebody should give him his own radio-podcast-thingy. Bravo!

Daniel Novakovic said...

Does he have a blog?

Marion said...

Hi Daniel!

Glad you enjoyed the set. Allan does have a blog, though content is limited at the moment. It's here:

http://kingdomalan.blogspot.com/

Check it out!

Your club night sounds so wonderful, hopefully I can make it over that way eventually. And until I just glanced at your site a minute ago, I had no idea that there was a video for "Our Love is Heavenly" !

That just made my day :)