What's in Phil's bag?

I've got new laptop bag, it's made by the same people who make Swiss Army Knives so has some extra unique features such as a secret pocket to keep your knife in and that all important clip so you can hang it off a mountain - obviously that's what swung my decision to buy it...


Anyway, this gives me an excuse to play around with some of flickrs' features and join the thousands of geeks exposing the contents of their bags. If you want to know the sad truth about the somewhat shocking amount of drugs being carried around by yours truly have a look at the far too detailed tagged picture after this link.

Things that I have been doing over the last week

• Watching Transformers: I heard a review on the radio that described it as the best film ever if you could take out all of the dialogue; my personal thoughts are to think of it in the same way as a roller coaster ride, that is it's fast, exciting and has pretty much the same narrative flow as a theme park ride. Just to be clear though, I thought it was fun.
  

• Buying lots of obscure CDs that nobody else I know would like and books that I won't read for month - I'll save details of those up for one of my "I really should write something here"-posts
  

• Spending way too much time playing morally questionable games on my XBox360.
  

• Attending a wedding.
  

• Playing with my Facebook profile too much
  

• Not sleeping properly, not that this counts as news in any sort of way.
  

Oh look! A flurry of activity

Don't worry, it's just me going on those strange CDs I ordered...

Here is my new Sunn O))) CD 'Oracle':


As you can see I got a free poster, a nice big cardboard sleeve and a 12" piece of vinyl too - apparently people used to play music from these.

It has two 'kind of new' tracks; the first one is really a remix of a remix which appears on the Jukebox Buddha compilation. This compilation was based around musicians remixing the loops created by something called the Buddha Machine - think of it as a really lo-fi iPod. for the original remix SunnO))) amplified the crap out of this small plastic box, added some more drones and a hint of Buddhist chanting. For the first track on Oracle 'Belülrol Pusztít' they add some more chanting courtesy of Attila Csihar and some jackhammer courtesy of Joe Preston.

I believe the second track on the CD is a re-recording of a composition they performed originally in a gallery space where the audience was only let in after the band had finished playing... :-|

Anyway, good CD.

Next up: Everlovely Lightningheart - Particles and Fields


This contains a CD-R with one 16 minute track consisting of a gentle mixture of drones, bells and piano. The CD case is hand sewn, covered in dirt and apparently some saliva - you can practically smell the elitism can't you!

I'm not going to post any mp3s from these two CDs as it would be taking the piss slightly, instead I'm going to post some music from these ones:


So, from the top: Hawkwind... No I haven't become a total hippy. There was a fantastic documentary on BBC4 (which you can now find on youTube here) a few weeks back which opened my mind up to this band. The early stuff they did contains plenty of elements I can appreciate: a bit of stoner rock, some very lo-fi experimental electronics, a good old fashioned relaxed attitude to taking heroic amounts of drugs, and Lemmy! So when their live double album Space Ritual got the deluxe reissue treatment and a favourable review on Pitchfork I took it as a sign to dabble in a bit of seventies rock. If you fancy joining in have a listen to this:

MP3: Hawkwind - Born to Go

In the bottom right we have Recoil. Recoil is the solo effort of ex-Depeche Mode band member Alan Wilder, this may seem a bit too clean and clinical for some people but I've always liked his stuff. It's sort of Mississippi Blues with a bunch of samples thrown at it - god help me, a bit like when Moby did Play... but better, obviously

MP3: Recoil - Prey

Finally: Weedeater. This band have either listened to a hell of a lot of Sleep, or consumed many many drugs - the name of the band gives it away I think, plus their Bass Player/Vocalist is also in a band called Bongzilla - I'm fairly sure they may have been influenced by something other than a misspelled Japanese movie monster. The following song may be my favourite, it's quite short, but very loud and the use of the phrase 'Wizard Fight!' is the best battle cry in the world EVER! (capital letters and poor use of the explanation mark are intentional). They also get bonus points for starting all of their loud songs with a wall of feedback.

MP3: Weedeater - Wizard Fight