compulsive Liars

It looks like the latest Liars joint (aptly titled "Liars") is a bit of a connundrum. Or at least, it's penny-farthinged the indie-critic world.

I 'picked up' the album this morning after seeing such contrasting reviews.

Ok, so I was mostly intrigued by the Liars "going pop"

As it turns out, they've remembered what song structure is! While using mostly loops and electronic techniques they no doubt honed in on for the last two albums, Liars seem to have crafted something "practical" in terms of mainstream music. You can bounce your head to this one.

In terms of sonic quality, the mixes are really dense and filled out, showing off their production skills more than anything. I doubt anything that was recorded stayed the way it was. Parts sound sampled, pieced together, chopped, and manipulated.

The lyrics and aura aren't really any less pretentious, and people certainly aren't getting as excited as they were when they heard "Mr. You're on Fire Mr." but the album definitely sounds like it's for the kids. "Houseclouds" even sounds like Radiohead at certain points and "What Would They Know" most definitely sounds like Joy Division (though very pleasantly so).

I guess I'm less stoked on this new Liars shit than I thought. They're a good group of musicians, and they make good art, it's just not the kind of thing I'm putting on all the time. Maybe the "pop" or "60's garage sound" of this one will change that, but until then, this one's about as inspired as a six-pack of Rolling Rock.

Rock the Bells 2007, San Francisco

It's 3:12AM and my eyes are watering. Maybe from the Matanuska Mist, maybe from something else.

I'm here to write about a festival that happened last weekend, and it happened like this.

My last midterm was Thursday August 16, and I had in my possession three (3) tickets to see the Metal Faced villain, vaudeville's best, at the Independent club in San Francisco. It's not like I wasn't warned. I was with my buddy Tomer, who, with Pomeranz (another buddy we met at the show), had been successfully evaded by Slick Rick at least twice. So we weren't really shocked or pissed when we received word that the show was postponed due to illness.

This turned into a Zeitgeist night. Fastforward through a day in the city, half a rack of pool, a bill plus at Amoeba, and some clubbin' at the Mezzanine and we're caught up to the important shit.

I got to AT&T parck early (11:30) and hungover [enough to spell park with a c] and excited, despite hearing iffy things about the technical and hospitality crews in LA. I heard after the fact that San Francisco does the Warped Tour in the same parking lot every year, so they must be used to these large crowds. Maybe it was just that I sprung for the VIP ticket, but I was inside and watching Immortal Technique after not much time at all. The line looked long, but my friends who didn't spring were inside in no time.

He spit some sick flows and told everyone that they were more than welcome to steal his music, with the caveat that they bump that shit on the streets. Sounds like promos to me.

Next was the highlight of the day, Pharoahe Monch. I had seen the dude in the club the night before with Supernat, and he rocked Simon Says and whatever, but this was the main event. Live band. Two soul backing singers (man, woman). And the San Francisco clear sea breeze.

The group delivered most of Desire ("Agent Orange" but not "What It Is"...) then did a little tribute thing to all of the dead rappers (fallen soldiers), closing of course, with J Dilla.

Can you guess what happened next?

If you can, we must be in love.

Yeah, they did that one too.

EPMD came on next, and the crowd was remarkably still. I don't know all of the lyrics either, but people seriously need to get up on their shit. After Erick and Parrish I went back to the VIP tent for some $10 mixed drinks and leather couches. I just barely missed Pharoahe at the Meet & Greet, but I did get a chance to say what's up to P and E. They've got a new reunion joint in the cooker, called "We Mean Business" I think.

Talib Kweli went on next and had Mos and Jean Grey guest with him. I was sortof bored by it, yet somehow managed to also miss Blackalicious on the Paid Dues stage at a similar time.

Public Enemy tore shit up and Flava Flav is ridiculous. They day got pretty hazy here. Somewhere between acts they played a Madlib instrumental from the A.G. album Get Dirty Radio (oh it's goooood.)

I think Cypress Hill went on next? I think I stood in 3 bathroom lines during that period of time.

Somewhere in the blur, the Roots played, and it was a live set (no shit live instruments, I mean the music was pumped and the vibe was upp), but the crowd was totally dead. Maybe it was cause it was like, 3:30 after two or three great acts and everyone was a little worn out. I can sympathize. They did a bunch of medley shit that I've been told is common for a Roots set (it was my first time seeing them, I'll be in touch about what happens with Big Daddy Kane and MC Lyte). They played the new shit, the good shit.

MF Doom and Nas didn't show up. Nas was dropped from the online lineup at the last minute. The programs at the show were way off, and still had him on the main stage before or after The Roots. Oops.

Doom was not a surprise. I didn't even bother to try to see him cause of what happened on Thursday. If he really is sick or whatever, he should have just canceled the shows and been up front about it.

Anyways, Wu finally came on and it was tight. They opened with Duel of the Iron Mic (or maybe played it second?), which was ridiculously awesome. Mef took the show away as always, and everyone did a little thing. Ghost did Fish, Redman came on for a song with Mef, Raekwon didn't really do much of anything (dude, where the fuck is Cuban Linx 2??!), Masta spit some shit, Streetlife and Cappa were there. Whole crew. Even the live band came out for a bit.

The Rage came on and did their rage thing. I think I would have liked them a lot more as me 10 years ago. Since many acts had live bands (Pharoahe, the Roots, Wu, Rage, maybe even Public Enemy?), there was a lot of live drumming, but the drum kits all sounded exactly the same, which was really annoying by the end of the night. Tom Morello's guitar sounds were pretty insane, and they played most of the really good shit. They closed with Killing in the Name. No shit. I wonder if anyone told them they should close with their biggest hit...

Technically, though, the festival was run very well. The layout in San Francisco was nice, and despite having to squash 10 wireless mics into a VHF system, the Wu was pretty audible most of the time.

Some qualms: no more pipe vendors. Being able to buy blunt wraps and chillums inside was awesome. I think this was gone last year too. Also, not nearly enough bathrooms in the VIP area. Maybe there were enough outside, but I had no idea where the fuck those were since I didn't see them on the way through the main entrance.

Also, when you're having huge tour events like this, don't print a huge fucking booklet a month and a half before the last show and expect it to be valid. The set times were totally inaccurate and people were totally fucked if they didn't print out the set times online that morning (ahem...)

All in all, there's room to grow, but good job.

Beat Konducta in Italy

Tomer's friend DJ Ekogirl hosted the Beat Konducta in India release party: Santa Cruz edition at that swank italian restaurant where they have djs on thursday nights.

bumpin music and $2 beers. good times.

apparantly she asked why anyone would want the promotional Oxperiment container. Obviously she's not a pill-popper. (ha)



Beat Konducta sounded good. i'll check it out when i get some cash (unlikely) or stones throw sends me a promo (even more unlikely) or i download it (sad but true).

I did pick up the new YNQ though, so you can expect some words on that sometime before early next week.

The Cabinet of Dr. No

Everybody knows who Oh No is now, right? Sure, you missed the Disrupt, and you might have heard that little ditty he did with all of those Galt MacDermot tracks, but what has he done lately?

Oh, he's been picking through various middle eastern psychedelic rock and funk records? Oh, you wanna hear it? Oh!

Yeah, it turns out (probably coincidentally) that Stones Throw can't stop dishing out the short-track instrumental hip hop albums. This one has a little more Donuts vibe than it does, say, Beat Konducta (check out the beginning of "Hot Fire," sounds a bit like "Anti-American Graffiti" huh?), but it definitely stands out on its own.

Most of it sounds loop-based, rather than chop & paste, but that could just be some of the man's slick skills. The interesting thing (and this isn't really new since Exodus) is that it's really not surprising that every sound on the record comes from those psych records. Aside from EQ/filtering, some delay, and maybe a few other DSP techniques, the ingenuity is all in the chop block.

All in all, I would call the Oxperiment a success, even if it sounds like Daedelus sampled that flute line from "Land Mine" first. The beats are simply really enjoyable. Pitchfork shit some mortar on it. Not quite a whole brick, but mortar nonetheless. Allmusic gave it half a star more than Exodus, but Exodus has the check mark for some reason. Cokemachineglow and tinymixtapes haven't touched it. I guess that leaves me pickin up the slack and listening to the bangin' joints.

Rock The Bells

Hey Guerilla Union --

What the fuck happened to Nas?

I just gave you props. Don't make me take them back, cause I will.

Best to be keepin' it right.

An accurate review of the LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini

Normally I would stand by LaCie's products. I've worked for companies that swear by them and until this year, I've never had anything bad to say about them. In March I purchased an Ethernet Disk Mini of the 500GB variety for $279. This was the model without gigabit ethernet, just standard old 10/100. After trying to set it up for about an hour, I determined that there was something wrong with the drive. My computer wasn't connecting to it properly and it wasn't shutting off. I could hold the power button for another hour, but nothing would happen. So, I called LaCie's customer support and they offered to replace the drive free of charge (through a fairly convoluted scheme: either I pay for shipping and they send me a new drive when they get mine, or I pay for a new drive, they pay for shipping, and refund my money when the receive the broken one). I opted for the latter option, as I had moved all of my music to the drive and no longer had space on my internal. While on the phone with them, I had noticed that the Gigabit version of the 500GB drive had dropped down to $209. So I asked, and they refunded my $70. Score one point for them.

The next week we picked up an identical drive to do networked backups at my workplace. The drive was dead on arrival. Turned on fine, but the configuration page was pure unrendered html. So, we phoned them up, and again they offered to replace the drive. This could have been coincidental, and at first I thought it was. I am no longer convinced.

In setting up the drive to do backups, I was greatly disappointed by the drive's lack of support for SSH or SFTP connections. Yes, I would love to have all of my backup data read by anyone on the University of California's LAN while it travels through the pipes. Perfect.

The next issue that came up was addressability over a subnet. We originally set it up with an IP in the 128.117.172.xx subnet, only to find that the building housing the clients' machines (128.117.170.xx) couldn't even see that the drive was there. We opened a ticket with LaCie's online support and have not heard anything back yet.

We made the mistake of bringing the drive into the 170 building while it was still configured for 172, thinking nothing of it. However, the drive threw a huge shit-fit, giving us error messages when using LaCie's proprietary IPConfigurator software. When we brought the drive back to the 172 building, everything was still fucked.

Rather than wait on their online ticketed support system, I decided to give them a ring. I explained to the seemingly friendly chap about my workplace mishaps with the Ethernet Disk Mini and he offered some suggestions: try connecting it directly to the computer by USB and then running the IPCnofigurator software. Ok, so he offered one suggestion. When the IPConfigurator software said it had found the drive but showed nothing in the list, our friend Ryan told us we would have to send the drive in, they would try to fix it or send us a new one.

My boss and I gave him a bit of grief for that one (it's our second drive, you guys used to be solid, etc), and rather than being a professional customer service representative, he got feisty on us and said something like well, we can call back and talk to another representative for the RMA procedure and then hung up.

Meanwhile, my drive at home isn't properly serving, and it's making crunchies that I can hear across the living room whenever I try to get a file list inside of Finder.


The system in the box is Windows Embedded, which means the device is basically a really old windows computer with a huge hard drive. It's clear that they rushed this guy out the door, as this is definitely a third distinct bug in the system, and it's really a shame. They used to be a reputable company with solid products (that were a bit expensive cause they were also a bit flashy). I was really happy with my d2 Triple Interface drive until it got stolen out of my car. Now, with my Ethernet Disk Mini crunching away and not publicly serving, I am thinking about the Western Digital myBook drive. Too bad those don't have FireWire 800. My audio latency will suffer.

So in short, don't buy a LaCie Ethernet Disk. In fact, don't buy anything from them at all. Do you really want to support a company that rushes buggy products out the door for profit? Oh, you're reading this on Windows... hmm.