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Sat, 09 Dec 2006

I suppose that somewhere here there are

announcements of what's going on and maybe there are also bands of people trying to wip up some false hysteria about pretty faces with a small talent for something irrelevant. It could also be that there is a bought and paid for media here that eulogises everything on cue and runs stupefyingly uninteresting stories on the personal lives of the small talents. It could also be that they turn on the subjects of the stories like rabid dogs and infect their readers with their own mean-spirited nastiness. It could be. Where I am is not any kind of utopian place. To avoid the worst of what I've been talking about you just need to be out of England. This place, the Ukraine, has its own scarey qualities but the music market consists of friends talking to each other about what they like and what's new. There is no music press whatsover, never mind good or bad. And so the tastes are pretty much unmanufactured. The people I talked liked some so-called classic rock like The Doors, some Russian rock groups and a few were into Trance. One project manager for a software development company particularly liked Trance as work background music and also for jogging. There's no particular lesson to be learnt from genre spotting I don't think except maybe it's just interesting to see what wins in a situation that is ... purer! And talking of purity, one thing I did bring with me was a DVD about Richie Hawtin which outlines his history as first of all an immigrant kid who was shifted from England to Windsor in Canada, just across the river from Detroit, and then through his early DJing days and onto where he is now. There are lots of interviews and some smallish music sections. Fans will love it and there are lots of interesting factlets for history collectors. The DVD is a special of Slices and is called Pioneers of Electronic Music Volume 1 - a documentary film about Richie Hawtin. And he lives in Berlin, which is where I head back to in a few days time. There is a certain purity there too but I think there's pretty much whatever non-purity you might be after as well. I'll finish up with a random list of bands - The Automatic, Brainless Wankers, Acoustic Ladyland, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Killswitch Engage. (thunderfinger)

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