Our species finds a strange attraction in all that is ‘last’ or ‘lost’. The value of an experience which future generations will be able to enjoy is nothing in comparison to the excitement felt in seeing something which will subsequently be destroyed. He who sees last sees best. Just like relatives that argue over who has spoken with the deceased last.

In the same way, our species is also fascinated by numbers; the first, the last are more important than what’s in-between, exception made for big, nice, round numbers. Like 100. Everyone loves 100! And people like Kevin Douch love the fact that they are able to celebrate their 100th release on a label, founded in Oxford as a diy project and growing to become a one-man label with an impressive artist roster, but still sticking to its ethics. For this occasion, Big Scary Monsters is releasing Party Hard, a DVD/CD double pack featuring all the wonderful bands who are (or have been) part of the BSM family.

The DVD contains promo and live footage from gigs and behind the scenes videos of Meet Me in St. Louis, Kevin Devine, Blakfish, Walter Schreifels, Pulled Apart by Horses,  Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. and many more, with bonus football tournament highlights (ha!), exclusive MP3s, and everything else your little beating fan-heart could possibly want.

DVD Tracklisting
1. Meet Me In St Louis – All We Need Is A Little Bit Of Energon And A Lot Of Luck (Promo video)
2. Pulled Apart By Horses – Meat Balloon (Promo video)
3. Shoes And Socks Off – Here’s My Head On A Plate (Promo video)
4. Secondsmile – Poets Unite In Hate (Promo video)
5. Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly – Whitewash Is Brainwash (Promo video)
6. This Town Needs Guns – 26 Is Dancier Than 4 (Promo video)
7. Dad Rocks! – Nothing Keeps Up (Promo video)
8. My Awesome Compilation – Our Lives: The Sequel (Promo video)
9. Hold Your Horse Is – You Show Up (Promo video)
10. Shapes – Trampled By A Horse (Promo video)

11. Colour – Chutes (Live at The Fly, London – 18.09.09 – last ever gig)
12. Kevin Devine – Brother’s Blood (Live at Banquet Records, Kingston – 22.07.09)
13. Walter Schreifels – She Is To Me (Live at Gaz and Black Metal Ian’s flat, Manchester – 04.04.10)
14. Adebisi Shank – Shunk (Live at The Twisted Pepper, Dublin – 11.06.09)
15. Tall Ships – Word Are Pegs (Live at Barden’s Boudoir, London – 15.02.10)
16. Talons – The Pearl (Live at Heaven, London – 17.11.09)
17. Blakfish – Make Your Bed And Lie In It (Live at Purple Turtle, London – 15.05.09)
18. Grown Ups – Pears (Live at Dauntaun, Milan – 09.06.10)
19. Mimas – SMOM (Live at Voxhall, Århus – 28.02.09)
20. Meet Me In St Louis – We Need To Act Like We Dont Need This Shit… (Live at The Star, Guildford – 07.05.05 – first ever gig)

As for the CD, it’s absolutely rockin’, with new and, ta-daa! unreleased tracks from sexy sexy bands like Shoes and Socks Off, Men, Talons, Tall Ships.. and the list goes on.

Sampler CD Tracklisting
1. Tall Ships – Plate Tectonics
2. Dad Rocks! – Kids
3. Hold Your Horse Is – Mackerel Jason
4. Adebisi Shank – International Dreambeat
5. Shoes And Socks Off – CYF
6. Kevin Devine – She Stayed As Steam
7. Men – Hard Water
8. Talons – Peter Pan
9. Mimas – Application

This gorgeous double package will be available at live shows, from Banquet Records in Kingston, and on BSMrocks.com between September 7th (that’s today!) and October 24th.

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1; making plans
Angus & Julia Stone are coming to Europe in November. The closest they will be to Vienna is Munich, and I’m very set on going. There just isn’t any other alternative.

2; new and old releases
My mailbox, heart and ears were filled with Natureboy, Shoes and Socks Off, and Cold Mailman. They’ve been on a list for ages because I don’t want these releases to go unnoticed; acoustic-ey and honest for the former and poppy and easy for the latter, every time I had a change of heart, I had music to back it up with.My friend Toph – aka Trouble Over Tokyo is also releasing his new album very soon, and the little I have heard of it (sadly I didn’t make it to the pre-release, listening party) is super-gorgeous. The new Azure Ray is lovely, and Bad Books have a rockin’ single. On another note (sort of), Rocky Votolato recorded a session with Daytrotter, you can listen to it here.

3; quiet days..
..spent reading (mostly in Starbucks sipping a soy latte and stopping once in a while to observe people). I’ve bought piles of books, I’ve reorganised my books, I’ve thought about my books, and now that I have just finished so many ways to begin by jon mcgregor, I really think everyone should know about it, because his writing is beautiful. that shall come, eventually.

4; internet love!
I love the internet SO much. I can waste millions of hours on it! which is why I am going to post this video, which is one of the many that have been taken at the Chris Garneau concert in Paris I was at last year (La Maroquinerie); this song is a Jenny O. cover, and I am in love with it.

seriously.. absolute gorgeousness, or what?!

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My pick for the week is Fireflies; as you might know, I like Chris Garneau very much. I’ve seen him live three times, in three different countries (Norway, Austria, France) and his shows very always superb. We got to know each other in 2007, and had a blast going to the cemetery in the middle of the night and drinking a lot beforehand. The thing is that Chris is actually a really hilarious, silly person sometimes, but it doesn’t reflect in his music or on stage, where he usually is pretty quiet. This video is beautiful but also full of humor, which is exactly how he is. So wonderful!

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Everything about the setting is made as a tribute to nature, from the voice and sounds that evoke big open spaces, lakes and mountains, to the projection behind the five silhouettes, plastered with deers and owls with seasons passing by, as on screen leaves detach themselves from tree branches and snow falls to an invisible ground.

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So obviously, one of my challenges while there was finding out how to make perfect swirls of this cinnamon goodness. I’ve asked people for recipes, but few of my classmates were much into baking. So I looked through Norwegian recipe books, on the internet, asked mothers of friends, and finally put together a close-to-perfect recipe. It’s painless, works every time, and only needs a couple of hours and some patience. The other great thing about this is that you can make it vegan pretty easily by changing the milk&butter ingredients to vegan equivalents. Make sure you leave yourself plenty of time and you don’t do this in a rush.

Ingredients:
for the dough
150g of butter (at room temperature)
90g of sugar
750g of flour (all-purpose is fine)
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 1/5 teaspoon of cardamom (optional)
a cube of fresh yeast (alternatively you can use 50g of active dry yeast)
300mL of milk (lukewarm)

for the filling
approx. 100g of brown sugar
approx. 100g of butter (at room temperature)
cinnamon

The first step is to squash the butter in a bowl with a fork until it’s almost creamy; add to it the flour, the salt, the cardamom, and the sugar. Mix well; it should have the appearance of angel cake crumbs – that’s the only way I can describe it! Now heat up the milk on low heat until warm. It shouldn’t be too hot, otherwise it will kill the yeast; if it is, wait until it cools down a little. Add the crumbled yeast to it, stir slowly, and wait for a couple of minutes. Then pour the milk with yeast into your flour mix, mix well with a fork, and put onto your work area (which ideally should be spacious and super-clean).

Now you’ve got to knead your dough. If you have any experience with bread-making, that’s exactly what you need to be doing, for at least 3 or 4 minutes. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, fear not! Kneading means basically working the dough, stretching it, folding it, and patting it down to stimulate fermentation. People have different techniques, you can even have a machine do that for you; the way I do it is I have my ball of dough in front of me, I pull at the top away from me, stretching it, then I fold it, turn it by a quarter-turn anti-clockwise, and start again. When you’re done, put it back in your bowl, cover it, put it in a warm place, and let it rest for 1 to 2 hours or until the dough is about double its original size. You shouldn’t let it rise too much though, otherwise your dough will be slightly sour, so keep checking on it to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Next up, you really should be making yourself a cup of tea and patting yourself on the shoulder for your patience. While you are waiting, mix in a small bowl the brown sugar and butter for the filling. After the dough has risen, you’ll need to deflate it; this is done by punching it down on your work surface. At this point, I usually divide the dough into two, and roll the first dough ball flat into a 1cm-thin rectangle with a rolling pin. Spread the filling onto it evenly with the back of a spoon, and sprinkle the whole thing with cinnamon. Next, roll it up tightly, and with a sharp knife cut it into 2cm slices. Do the same for the second dough ball. Put the slices down flat, 5 cm apart, on baking trays lined with baking paper, cover, and allow for them to rise (this should take about 30 minutes). While they are rising, preheat the oven to 200°C. When they have risen, put the trays in the oven and leave for about 10min, or until golden brown.

Enjoy!

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Recently, I read the Perks of Being a Wallflower; I know it’s quite the classic for most kids young adults my age (like Catcher in the Rye or maybe even the Bell Jar) but I’d never managed to somehow sit down and read it. So, the book was ordered, paid, waited for, and read in 1.5 days. Maybe someday a couple of thoughts to that book will come your way, for now, all I will say is that the novel lingered in the back of my head for a while as I was meeting old school friends, and I asked myself if the kids who love that book and the main character aren’t the exact same kids who would make fun of someone ‘different’ in High School. My heart said, YES. It’s silly, but figures in books will seem much more charismatic no matter what, even if they are freaks of nature or antisocial geniuses. What really touched me in that work was the naivety in the main character, his being very genuine and true. I like to think that I sometimes am like that, or, often. I think I am a nice person. I complain a lot, and I can be picky and annoying, but I’m very rarely unfriendly and I try to give people a chance, even if they haven’t. I think I am fair. I’m also a little lost and confused, which is where Enid comes into play. Enid is the main character of Ghost World (one of my favorite graphic novels and also one of the best movies ever made), she is a teenager who wants to be a punk and wants to be a girl and wants to be a girlfriend and wants to be independent but wants to depend on people; she wants art and music and everything in-between and is quite puzzled by the future. That’s me. 65% Ghost World, 35% the Perks of Being a Wallflower.

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In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis tells the story of a young and rich businessman and of his daily (and nightly) life in Manhattan; His being exhaustively methodical leads to the novel being abundant with adjectives, lists, and descriptions. Patrick Bateman could, for all we know, be one of the unnamed characters in The National’s Alligator-Boxer-Violet trilogy; and seeing Matt Berninger on a stage, lost in the world of his head and in the music, speaking to no one, almost failing to notice the audience in front of him, reinforces this theory.

There is something unsettling about him; he is a world of contradictions, and as he appears in his suit, neither smiling nor completely inexpressive, he doesn’t acknowledge much of what is surrounding him. There is the microphone, which he grabs right away, leaving the talking up to his band mates; “we expected something, something better than before, we expected something more”, he starts singing. Start a War is a perfect opener on this slightly rainy August day and like an entirely choreographed gesture, as he turns to the drums halfway through the song and lowers his head, the rain starts.

At this point, the crowd already fluctuates between cheering and staring in awe; during the hypnotic Anyone’s Ghost, the catchy Bloodbuzz Ohio and Mistaken for Strangers, the band’s vocalist often leaves the front of the stage in favour of the space in front of Bryan’s drum-kit, pacing and twirling like a restless child, twisting his mouth and his hands as he does so.

The real first surprise (or ‘hope’, for those who are familiar with their early work) of the evening comes halfway through Secret Meeting, as Matt trades his monotone voice for sudden screaming. From that point on, parallel to a Mr. Bateman of sorts, Mr. Berninger is also a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, mixing images of perfect (“You’re the only thing I ever want anymore”, Conversation 16) and protective love (“I defend my family”, Afraid of Everyone) getting tangled in a net of obsessive-compulsive, anxious paranoia. His voice almost breaks from screaming the first lines of Abel, he kicks the mic to the floor after England, picks it up again on time to sing over a trombone in Fake Empire, the song that glorifies unending, thoughtless nights and all of a sudden, it’s over and they’re gone.

The second song of the encore almost manages to sum up the whole mystery that is the National; going from obvious statements (“sitting at the punch table swallowing punch”), to self-deprecating thoughts (“everything I love gets lost in drawers”) to images and snapshots that make the listener smile (“I wanna [..] put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up”), Slow Show is slow-motion and fast forward through human impulses and emotions, with love, sadness, disappointment, thoughtfulness and self-reflection; it’s the image of a generation condemned by bomb threats and boredom.

And as the concert comes to an end, why don’t we try and forget who we are for a second? Why don’t we close our eyes and do something wild, and crazy, pretending we are who we thought we would be, or that we can be who we used to be? A couple of minutes into Mr. November, this charismatic and weird character climbs down the stage, unaware of musicians and technicians stretching the mic cable to the extreme so it doesn’t get tangled, and walks through the audience. His first and last acknowledgment of an adoring public is to remind us that we all had our moment of being “in our best clothes”, that we all thought at one point we’d be “the new blue blood”; but can we touch that feeling with a finger again, that feeling of being invulnerable? As he stands on the edge, he sings “It takes an ocean not to break”. And all of a sudden, we feel infinite.

All photos by Nikolaus Ostermann – blog.ikoon.at

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Back then, music didn’t seem all that important. Sure, there were tapes, mostly of stories in which the main character is someone a little naive and not courageous at all, someone we could relate to, who once in a while would break out into song; but this, we later learned, isn’t music really, it’s just a way to pass the time. Music is passion, like the passion we had for tents, or stolen cookies, or sea shells or secrets. Thanks to Uno Møller and Lazy Acre Records, we can become kids again, and this time though there is no map with an X and no best friend to point a flashlight at, the treasure will delight each and everyone of us, because it’s special in the same way that a weird-looking stone found on a summer adventure is special to every child.

So, this online treasure hunt goes like this: you hop from blog to blog, collecting keywords, listening to tracks from the record as you do so, while reading all the lovely things that bloggers worldwide have to say about this lovely Norwegian boy and his openhearted music. After you’ve collected all the keywords, you will be entered into a draw to win a wonderful treasure, maybe not quite as tangible as plastic gemstones your best friend gave you or dried flowers from summer camp, but still very special: Uno has agreed to record a song ONLY FOR YOU, as well as two cover songs of your choice. ANYTHING is possible. In addition to this, the packaging will be handmade and rockin’, we promise. So, today’s keyword is TO, and tomorrow’s will be found on my partner in crime’s blog (everyone is connected!) over at http://blog.ikoon.at. If you just happen to drop by and hear about this for the first time, fear not! for all keywords can be collected if you go to the Lazy Acre Records homepage for the first hint.

First wave is track #7 of a wonderful album which I’ve had the chance to be a little part of by illustrating it and giving some input; in the last 8 months I have seen Uno’s music change, grow, and it has been a little bit in my life every day. You can get Songs from My Beautiful Colourball as a name-your-price download from here, and I promise that spending even the tiniest amount on this record is worth it..

(Photo Credit: Hanne Bjugstad)

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I’m your teenage FBI if you want
I’ll find out what this life is about
Cause we weren’t told, that chemistry is all we are

No one ever told you that there’s no truth
Truth isn’t out there, nowhere out there in space
And we weren’t asked, if this life is the one we want

And you say that I’m some kind of special agent
Cause I never trust anyone

You keep on asking me, what I’m writing all these songs for
I wish that I only knew

Maybe we should meet some friends, that would help
Maybe we should sit and wait for the end
Cause we weren’t told, that this life is our only one

And you say that I’m some kind of special agent
Cause I never trust anyone

You keep on asking me, what I’m writing all these songs for
I wish that I only knew

You say let’s go to Denmark for our holidays
We’ll ride some horses on the beach and live in a bungalow
You say that’s what you dreamed of, since you were a child
And in the evening we’ll have candlelight and fish

And you kiss my neck while I do the dishes
We would have the time of our lives

You keep on asking me what I’m writing all these songs for
I guess I just tried to save the world

- Get Well Soon, “Teenage FBI”

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