The Drones @ The Corner Hotel Saturday

The Drones – the group dubbed ‘Australia’s most important band’ – took to the stage at the Corner on Saturday night to a capacity crowd, in one of their final performances before they head to the States to showcase their considerable talents. Velvet Underground-esque support act Snowman set the agenda with a set of haunting, richly layered noise using sax, violin, wide-eyed chanting and at times almost operatic vocals to build a wall of defiant, experimental sound.

The Drones peddle a brand of simple, yet sophisticated dark rock, pioneered by the likes of The Birthday Party and The Dirty Three and energetic front man Gareth Liddiard channels the ghosts of every disgruntled, black-clad loner who ever sat down with his guitar and a chewed pencil.

On CD, some Drones songs can sound under-produced and murky – but live, Liddiard completely inhabits them, spitting out the pithy syllables like stray bits of tobacco from his rollie. He’s met by a similarly angry and unfeasibly tall audience who sing back every word to big numbers like the captivating, anthemic, ‘Shark Fin Blues’, with the additional spectator cry of “Go you Drones!” hollered for good measure.

At times a number of burly blokes at the front attempt to revive the near-extinct practice of crowd-surfing, which is alarming considering the size of some of them. Eventually a smaller guy is lifted good-naturedly above the throng. Nobody else tries to mount the audience, but there is a definite rowdiness to some audience members, who I suspect miss a lot of the subtlety and depth in songs like ‘Locust’.

The tales woven into each song evoke something that can only be described as Australian Gothic – and this refers more to the mystical storytelling tradition of a wild colonial past, of the sort brought to technicolour life by Sidney Nolan (and, more recently, Nick Cave’s film, The Proposition), than any 80s eyelinered subculture. Indeed, Cave is probably the link between the sub-cultural and historical ‘gothic’ territories mined by The Drones.

This heritage is thrown into sharp relief by an acoustic encore performance of ‘Sixteen Straws’, a ballad in the literary sense – 30 verses of rum, sodomy and the lash (as The Pogues might say) at the hands of the dreaded British in Port Macquarie, in a century long ago and far from the consciousness of much of the crowd.

With Liddiard at the helm, The Drones are nothing short of masterful in a live context and their rich storytelling deserves to be heard on the world stage.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine. Photos copyright Susanna Nelson 2007.

Lo-Fi-Fnk – Boylife (Speak and Spell)

 

Lo Fi by name, but certainly not by nature, Swedes Lo-Fi-Fnk are all flashing lights, day-glo rave flavours and seriously annoying stop-start keyboard blips and sequencers. Buddies Leo Drougge and August Hellsing formed the band at school in 2001, “trying their hand at what could only be described as instrumental soft house disguised as Bruce Springsteen,” according to their publicity. I wonder what the Boss would have to say about that – Boylife, their debut LP, is about as far from Thunder Road as Fatboy Slim is from Neil Young. And I don’t know about you, but to these ears, that’s pretty far.

The lads are bursting with energy and a swag of revived sound samples last heard somewhere in a Docklands warehouse in the 90s. They were obviously giving Armand Van Helden’s back catalogue a good workout and imbibing far too much red cordial when they came up with this garish debut – it plays like a continuous aural strobe light. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot more to it.

To be fair, some moments of Prince-like funk and nasal Pet Shop Boys vocal stylings (albeit with a thick Swedish inflection) occasionally emerge before they are crash tackled by the army of busy, programmed beats. In the less noisy moments it is even possible to trace a lineage from Boylife back to the infectious early days of ‘Madchester’ in the early 90s when pop first met hard dance in the shape of bands like the Beloved and the Shamen. But perhaps a little less of the frustratingly random beats and blips and more of the melody of those bands would have made this CD bearable.

The band have been likened to a ‘happy Cut Copy’, but Cut Copy’s innovative, layered electronic music makes Lo-Fi-Fnk seem like overexcited toddlers. The big floor-packing single ‘Change Channel’ will definitely appeal to young and crazy shape-pullers who can accommodate an assault of multiple, competing, asymmetrical beats, synth blasts and schoolground chant vocals, but for the most part I felt like a rabbit trapped in front of one of those enormous semi-trailers festooned with marker lights. There are far better things coming out of Sweden right now.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.

Shy Child – Noise Won’t Stop (Wall of Sound / Liberator)

 

True to their word, Brooklyn duo, Shy Child, keep a frenetic pace throughout Noise Won’t Stop. The album is a showcase of so-called ‘new rave’, but with a bouncy, shrieky edge that will keep enthusiasts (and all the neighbours in the block) up late into the night. It should probably come with an advisory sticker for anyone who is allergic to the interminable synth of happy hardcore, which some of us thought was safely locked away in the 90s vault for now. Wrong.

These guys have probably kept purveyors of fine keytars and other synth relics in business long after they would otherwise have turned away the last big-haired punter back in 1989, just as computers were taking over the dance music scene. Unfortunately, the Shy Child guys use these otherwise pleasing instruments in a way that would probably make big muscly blokes down the local nightclub rhythmically punch the air and ‘build shelves’ in a not entirely pleasing way.

This album harks back to the dance paradigm where a low fidelity sound built to a crescendo of high definition wizardry, and that build up was the high point of an otherwise fairly predictable trajectory. It’s a formula that worked for many years before the punters tired of it, and its appearance on an album at this point in time seems either hopelessly out of date or the start of a brand new revival. Obviously the fans of this 21st century take on 90s techno will be yelling above the din that this is the new future of dance music.

Noise Won’t Stop is too testosterone-fuelled for this listener, and while it will please the fans – angry dance-oriented boys, mostly – it jabs too hard and with too little variation to do anything for me. Like it or loathe it, with bands like Shy Child and Lo Fi Fnk, the 90s dance revival has finally arrived.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine. 

Conditions are Clear

Round-the-clock environmental monitoring has a range of uses and is becoming popular in new buildings as a means of regulating energy usage. Susanna Nelson looks at a wireless device which can collect data about the conditions in a building.

Many of us tend to regard environmental monitoring systems as the stuff of Bond movies or the Da Vinci Code, existing mainly in grand public buildings to protect sensitive government archives or precious collections of valuable art. But environmental sensors used to track variations in light, sound, temperature and humidity and other conditions in buildings have much wider application, in modern and heritage buildings alike.

Marketed in Australia by engineering solutions provider NVSI, EnviroPoint is a monitoring system that can collect and store information about a range of different environmental conditions in a building and transmit that data in real time using a secure wireless connection.

Continuous monitoring means a lot more work for the cabling industry. “The sensors may be wireless, but every wireless system requires a cabled network. All it means is that the sensors themselves can be moved to areas within a building where the cables cannot go,” says NVSI Operations Manager Shirley Chester.

The Australian Museum adopted the EnviroPoint system back in 2001, and recently went wireless. Curator Colin Macgregor is impressed by the sensitivity and flexibility of the system. “We were interested in making use of the cabling that had already been installed for Internet connectivity rather than hard-wiring a new monitoring system to the building. We thought it would be great to use an integrated system which could make use of email and, down the track, SMS messaging to alert us if there was anything unusual happening in the building.

“Much of the building is heritage listed and we can’t drill holes in the walls, but the wireless pods can be placed in rooms where cabling cannot be installed and these transmit back to the nearest receiver which is plugged into an existing computer node.

“An added advantage is that we can check the calibration of these small wireless sensor pods on our monitoring computer by placing them in a sealed humidity chamber at a known relative humidity, without having to rig up wiring connections through the side of chamber.

“Humidity is the big problem for the museum. It causes cracking, mould, shrinkage, distortion and corrosion of the items on display. The EnviroPoint system sends an alarm via email if the humidity drops below 40% or rises above 60% at any point.
The system will also alert us to water on the floors and enable us to act if there is a threat of flooding.

“Light and sensitivity is also important, because extreme light conditions can cause the pigmentation of our collections to fade. With this system we can monitor lighting 24 hours a day. We even have a device which is triggered every time a camera flash goes off, and it can record the number of flashes per day. It’s not such a problem for us, but somewhere like the Louvre, in Paris, where thousands of flashes go off every day, the intensity of the light could damage the artwork,” he says.

While museums and galleries form a significant part of her existing client base, Shirley Chester believes EnviroPoint has wide applicability in other industries too. “So far we have targeted museums, art galleries, heritage and archive organisations but in recent times we have had interest from warehouse owners, heating, air-conditioning and medical device manufacturers,” Shirley says. “There are a number of markets for these devices.”

ResMed, a medical device manufacturer which specialises in sleep disorder breathing products, has placed an order for the system. ResMed’s products must be manufactured in accordance with specific process requirements for temperature, humidity and barometric pressure.

ResMed test engineering manager Peter Hladky is satisfied that the readings provided are accurate. “They have an error margin of approximately 2%. We have our sensors adjusted to take samples every five minutes. The only problem is that our factory has quite dense walls and the signal is sometimes weak. Fortunately, the sensors continue to take samples and when connectivity is re-established, the data they have collected is automatically re-transmitted. It’s quite a robust system in that way,” he says.

“There is also a user-friendly interface with graphs and maps to help you make sense of the data. The alarm system can be set to provide warnings when conditions are approaching a set threshold as well as when the threshold is reached.”

Shirley sees the construction industry as another promising market. “Profit margins in construction can be very low, and EnviroPoint can help the sector to cut costs,” she
says. “The requirement for vibration monitoring during commercial or industrial construction means that, currently, a qualified engineer has to survey sites, swapping data cards in static data- loggers, to preserve the chain of data transfer. The data is then downloaded back at the office but is already out of date. This seems
an enormous waste of time when a product like EnviroPoint can communicate the data to the office in real time, store it securely in a database, print out reports automatically and alert the appropriate people immediately if there is a problem.”

EnviroPoint can be used to monitor energy usage in existing buildings, making it desirable for those seeking to encourage sustainable outcomes and to ensure compliance with green building regulations. “One chap we’re talking to
is a lighting expert and he wants to survey buildings with a view to designing lighting which gives the right amount of light in the right places to cut down on wastage,” Shirley says.

“We already have some warehouses being built with automatic trip- lights for when people enter particular areas, saving lots of money in electricity. We also know that many air-conditioning suppliers currently only monitor the exhaust air, but what happens right by the window on a sunny day? It gets hot. The EnviroPoint system can be used by heating, ventilation and air- conditioning suppliers to monitor where clients have reported problems with a service, and to improve it.

“The system can be used to monitor new, green buildings to ensure that energy usage is kept to a minimum, and ongoing monitoring will soon be seen as desirable in all homes. The concept of the smart house is already here, but I think it will become more widely accepted to monitor energy usage in the home in more ways
than just the electricity meter.

“The growing emphasis on monitoring energy usage around the clock in every home is great news for cablers — there’s a lot of infrastructure to install.”

Appeared online and in print in Cabling Connection October/November 2007.