John Walker's Electronic House

I’m going through one of my 3WK phases again. It’s an internet underground radio station, that acts as my joint-leading source for discovering new music. (The other is Matthew George via ICQ. Kieron, you’ve slipped into a poor second place – tsk). The joy of the station is the constant necessity to task-switch from whatever I’m doing to see the name of the band currently playing, and make note of it in a permanently open Notepad window for future seekage. Today I have already listed:

decomposure / disconnect / at home and unaffected / unschooled

sufjan stevens / chicago / illinois / asthmatic kitty

And it’s only just gone 11am.

I hoover up new bands with an insatiable greed, and broad remit. 3WK is an excellent means to discover such newness (and also excellent people, fighting hard against the despicable DMCA rulings that make hosting such a station near-impossible – it’s only a meagre $10 a month for the pleasure of the high-bandwidth connection), broadcasting bands under the meaningless label of “indie”, which is a shorthand way of saying, “not playing the same old plastic-coated shit you hear everywhere else”. So in an hour you can discover eight new bands whose albums are now required if life is to remain liveable, and also that the new System of a Down stuff is quite extraordinary and actually does deserve to be on the station despite your initial “what on earth are they doing playing that“, while every Elliot Smith track you’ve ever heard is remarkable and it sucks that he’s dead and how come you only own Figure 8?

The other great pleasure is following the links to band’s sites. The air is so much fresher outside of the Big 4’s strongest influence. Wanting to learn more about the best girl-noise I’ve heard in forever, I discovered that Dixie Dirt are giving away their first album for free download. So pleased was I that I bought their new album for 8 pounds (anyone know why WordPress can’t cope with pound signs?) via their site. This is how it should and does work.

One of the musicians in this morning’s collection, Decomposure, has given me an extra treat – a term for describing the sorts of Christians who make me want to investigate genocide: “opposite-day Christianity”.

From the song ‘Disconnected’:

The Jesus i know had a nice home filled with stuff he worked hard to own
The Jesus i know saw those alone and sad and turned them out into the cold
The Jesus i know put business over spirit and soul – buy more, there’s no such thing as too much greed
The Jesus i know lobbied the government so his teachings could be enforced properly

i’ve got a line direct to heaven that sends me all i need
and there’s no disconnect, i’m always right because i’ve got god with me
your words have no effect, i’m better and it’s clear to see
you’ve got a twig stuck in your eye, the god i know is on my side
again.

In response to some reviewers’ accusations that the song is anti-Christian, he writes:

“I’m a Christian. i’m not going to say too much about the tenets of what i believe, or even attempt to justify to you why i believe it, but i do believe it, even the crazy stuff that might sound like unicorns and wizards. And no, believing one thing that seems irrational does not automatically make me talk to my toes or push a baby carriage full of soup cans and cheerily doff a dead cat to other nervous pedestrians. Like almost everything, it’s something with a lot of components that i’ll probably never figure out completely, never mind implement perfectly, and what i’ve got is hard to sum up in a couple sentences without overgeneralizing.”

I like that. More importantly, the music is experimental and interesting. And furthermore, in the post.