For your information: the entertainments begin at 8pm, and early on we’ve been playing lots of drone, noise, folk, prog, spoken word and esoteric hooting, largely for our own benefit, before moving on to skronk, punk, rock ‘n’ roll, dancehall, dubstep, very gay disco and outright populist selections - my Addicted To Love covers medley must be heard to be believed! - once the punters turn up. As if that wasn’t enough, you get first dibs on Optimo queue tickets, too.

So, join us this coming Sunday for our final stint, and limber up for the return of Spastachrist on April 16th, when he will be joined by William Bennet from out of noise whores Whitehouse, playing an uncharachteristic Italo Disco DJ set.

They told us ‘anything goes’, so it probably will. Expect wiggy electronics, dub, progressive folk, avant-wank honkings, punk, disco, rockabilly, &c.

Do join us for a nice quiet pint.

Strictly Gingermaican sounds, from unconscious reggae to rough ska via wobbly dub, but most of all nasty slack dancehall from the 1980s, 1990s and today. (If you’ve heard the Sister’s sets at Optimo Hogmanay celebrations in the past, or my efforts at Stet, you’ll know what to expect.)

See you there?

My bit will be about, very roughly speaking indeed, hacking and art, with an emphasis on small interventions, loose couplings of existing ideas and technologies, stuff that I will take great pains to avoid calling ‘life hacks’, the formally experimental novels of B.S. Johnson, stuff about social engineering, stuff about art that requires the involvement of the viewer, the relationship between all these things (if there is one), and some other things, too. There will also be covert cameraphone videos of folk keying in their PIN numbers, and projections of exciting celebrity details drawn from Paris Hilton’s hacked Sidekick.

My portion of the evening will be, as you can see, a bit loose, but the idea of the Upgrade! events is to prompt lively debate more than to present a solid argument. That’s my excuse, anyway.

Do come along.

Update: Here’s the official blurb for the talk, which may or may not make clear what it is I’ll be banging on about:

> [Jack] will be talking about, for want of a better word, hacks. For the purposes of this talk, hacks are small actions or concepts that may have large effects, loose couplings of existing ideas that produce unforseen consequences, or any elegant intervention that changes our understanding of a system. Though the roots of the term lie in the world of computer hacking, it can be applied to everything from changes individuals make to their own lives, artistic practices developed to engage audiences, or small shifts in society itself. It remains to be seen whether there is a relationship between hacks and hacking in these different fields.

Also, there are disc jockeys: Sister Motivator and I (Nurse Möt) will be previewing our Worries In The Dance ska, dancehall and dub thing in the back room of the top secret venue¹, while Maggie Jones and I (Möt) will be doing bleak grime, nasty dubstep and elderly rave in the main room.

The evening begins at 9pm sharp, and ends at 2am, giving Glaswegians plenty of time to catch the last bus home. There are a limited number of tickets available on the door, at a price I can’t remember, but that is sure to be very reasonable.

One last thing - this is the last Stet in its current incarnation, or, in the multilingual Stet house style, La Finale.

1. It’s the Counting House, West Nicholson Street, Edinburgh, and the password to gain entry is Ch-ching. It’s near the Peartree, and above the Blind Poet, apparently. Don’t tell anyone. I mean, tell everyone.

Update: Blimey! A splendid night, with Sov on fine form and debuting some great new songs (especially Adidas Hoodie, and one which I think is called Public Announcement, a half grime, half 1976 punk thing). Proceedings were marred only slightly by The Counting House turning out to be run by total asshats, who closed us down half an hour early due to some minor illegal activities by patrons, and then attempted to charge us £500 for a damaged hand-dryer despite making an absolute fortune on the bar. Boo hiss.

It’s a donationware nightclub, so you can pay what you like to listen to me playing dancehall, dubstep and other “Gingermaican” sounds alongside Richard from Stuff Records and in between live sets by Nightmare Jazz Café, Mellow Sub Machine and The BPL. (Is it just me, or do all three need to have a nomenclatural rethink, as a matter of some urgency?!)

See you there!

The German word Umlaut means roughly sound change, being composed of um- (a prefix often used with verbs involving “change”) and Laut, meaning “sound”.

Via, kinda, the always-splendid New Things weblog, which points to the Wikipedia Unusual Articles page.

Talking of playing records, or sound changing, I’ll be contributing to a Stet radio show, featuring a mix and some form of interview with myself and DJ Maggie Jones about the club on Subcity Radio. People living in Glasgow can tune in to 87.7 on the FM dial, others may click through to the Subcity website and access streaming audio in the MP3 and, rather wonderfully, Ogg Vorbis formats. The show is tentatively scheduled to air on the 10th of February - the time is as yet unconfirmed, so I’ll update as soon as I know more details.

The music I contribute will probably explore Machine Windrush territory - that’s a really stupid genre neologism I coined just this minute, since a lot of the records I play these days are, rhythmically speaking, Jamaican-born, and made in the UK, on computers and other machines. A possible, arguably more euphonious, alternative term: Tilbury Digital. (For those wondering what on earth I’m wittering about, this page might clear things up.)

• Prince Video makes ‘dirty twisted nasty dubby dancehall from deepest Govanhill.’
• GRNR make ‘distorted fairground electronica’ (presumably it’s a dancehall fairground, this time).
• Germlin makes ‘insane bleeping’ (more accurately, he sounds like a child with ADHD raping a Gameboy).

I’ll be playing records one after another, as will my good friend Sister Motivator.

Sub Sessions is a donationware nightclub at the Sub Club, and the date for your diary is Wednesday, February the 2nd.

NB: if you like Jamaican music, and working under the assumption that mentioning it in public will make us get our act together, keep an eye out for future events, provisionally entitled Worries In The Dance with Möt, Sister Motivator and Ego Spastachrist on three decks, one 7” each at a time.

Should your ears need solace in the deep cold of the Scottish winter, the next installment of Stet features Kode 9 & Daddi Gee. Live and, in all probability, direct.

The pair haven’t released a whole lot as a duo, but if you listen to their debut, Sign Of The Dub (4.8MB MP3) you’ll probably want to come along. It’s an utterly sublime cover of Prince’s Sign o’ the Times, stripped back to a nasty beat-free dub, with the lyrics run through a patois filter. The fact that their stage rider consists of nothing but a throne for Daddi Gee to sit on should serve as further encouragement to attend. (You heard: a fucking throne!)

There’s a pair of dates, Stet being an intercity affair: Friday the 11th of February, at the Bongo Club, Edinburgh, and Saturday 12th of February, at the Cotton Club, Dundee. Both evenings will set you back £5. Both feature Mot (that’s me, obviously) playing records one after another on two turntables, and Maggie Jones playing lots of records all at the same time on several computers.

See you there?

P.S. Apologies for the posting hiatus - moving house, Christmas, Hogmanay, London, work, furniture assembly etc. etc.