Dom Davis (The Blog)

Given I tend to listen to fairly alternative stuff it can make finding new music a bit challenging. I can’t get recommendations off my friends, the radio doesn’t play anything remotely close to the genres I like and I no longer go clubbing very often (which was a great source of new bands).

As with most things in life my problem is one that can be solved by the Internet, in this case with last.fm. Bung in an artist or genre you like and it creates your own personalised radio station with similar tracks for your listening pleasure. Links through to iTunes let you purchase any tracks you like and sample other music by the same artist.

One particular track that took my fancy was only to be found on a pretty obscure compilation. Figuring there might be some hidden gems on the rest of the album I bought the whole thing. A wise purchase as it turned out.

One of the tracks that I rated highly on this new album claimed to be Bring Me Violence by Tactical Sekt. Now I’m a bit anal with music and like to have it rated, correctly tagged and resplendent with lyrics so I decide to grab the track lyrics off the web and then investigate Tactical Sekt in more depth.

It’s here I hit a brick wall. It’s not that I couldn’t find the lyrics, it’s that they were completely different. A quick visit to YouTube confirmed that this wasn’t so much a remix but a completely different song. I left it at that and went in search of other artists on the album who were less problematic.

Yesterday during lunch the song popped onto my iPod and I decided to go all out and pin down this track once and for all. Armed with Google I plugged in a quoted search using great chunks of the lyrics. Google returned a result, but for a different band and song entirely: Existence by Solitary Experiments.

Off to iTunes again, turns out that this track is also on the compilation. My search stalled here. I only had part of the album on my phone so I couldn’t tell if it was on the version I’d downloaded.

Fast forward to last night where I was able to sit down in front of the desktop with my master music library and continue the investigation.

First things first, Existence was on the album I had and it was the track before Bring Me Violence. Next I asked Shezam to identify the tracks for me. No luck, too obscure. My next trick was to find Bring me violence on YouTube and compare it against both tracks in iTunes. Bingo! What claimed to be Existence was in fact Bring Me Violence. The track names had been transposed by whoever put the album on iTunes. A further check confirmed the song I like was indeed a heavily remixes version of Existence. Meta data updated I could now rest easy and can now go and instigate Solitary Experiments to see if they have any other ditties I might enjoy.

Shame I hadn’t worked this out before my stag do. The music was such that it would have fitted in nicely if I’d been able to request it. Next time maybe

There are, it seems, three types of song: Those that have been penned by bands large enough to warrant legal teams ordering takedown notices of their songs on YouTube; those that are on YouTube; and those that are so obscure that they’re not even on YouTube. The majority of my music seems to fall into category C, which is, if you consider it, probably a good thing for the wider world as it means I can’t share little ditties such as Drop (a rather fine tune from Modulate on the album Detonation) with everyone else. Personally I think it’s a shame as Drop has formed rather a fitting backing track to today and would be a fine example of just exactly what those coming clubbing after my stag do are letting themselves in for.

There are other tracks on YouTube from the same artist but my boss called as I was doing the necessary prep work (on my walk home, so no, I wasn’t skiving) so instead of walking along, face glued to the phone I was walking along talking to myself (headphone with mic). This could also probably viewed, by the wider world, as a good thing and, instead, I shall leave any investigation of Modulate as a task for the reader.

I’ve always enjoyed clubbing and have been a regular patron of a few dark and dingy holes in my life. I go clubbing to dance which means, unlike most people, I go sober [duff kidneys] and alone¹. Given the latter I need to be damn sure there is going to be decent music because a night of watching pissed people dance to crap music is bad enough when drunk and in a group. I also like the patrons to be older because being the only non member of staff in their 30s is a bit tragic. Mix those requirements with my taste in music and these days I’m limited to about 3 clubs in the UK which means I just cut to the chase, go to London and patronise the grandaddy of them all: Slimelight. 8+ hours of terror EBM, agrotech, power noise, darkwave and just a soupçon of goth with the odd bit of industrial, coldwave and 80s cheese thrown in for good measure (you’ve just got to love alternative genre names ).

Since Slimelight is open all night I used to get a train from Colchester at about 10pm, get there for just gone 11, dance the night away, leave at 7:30am, get the tube back to Liverpool Street, catch the first train home and die. Readers of my old blog may even remember the entries written in an attempt to stay awake after a night out.

In those days I was younger, single, unemployed and only an hour or so away from London. These days I have a fiancée, a job and live 3 hours from London. Not only is going to Slimelight a marathon effort but it also cuts into precious Zozo time and would leave me dead for a week (unless I had Monday off to recover too). Sadly I think my clubbing days are over and it’s time to hang up the glowsticks, put away the black tshirts with fluorescent slogans and leave the dancing for family events in the future where I can embarrass the kids.

In order that I go out with a bang rather than a whimper I’ll be heading to Slimelight one last time for a post stag dance-a-thon, the details of which are a topic for another entry.

¹ I don’t know many (any?) people who would really want to go to the clubs I go to and I’ve found people to be notoriously unreliable come 11pm on a Saturday as they’ve generally been drinking. Much easier to go alone and tell people who might be interested where you’ll be if they want to show up. That way they can also head off with the people they came with if they don’t like it and not ruin my night

The Zozo and I have wildly different tastes in music, which is hardly surprising given I tend to listen to fairly fringe stuff where a single track can encompass an entire genre. Now you’d think that this would cause big problems when it comes to agreeing on music for the wedding but it has, in fact, made it easier, the rule being roughly this: If it’s on my iPod it’s not being played at the wedding¹. Instead we’re picking things from a list of tracks that Zo thinks would be good that I think are fun too (see, works out well for me ).

One such track is a version of the theme to this years mass vuvuzela concerts in South Africa called, I’m lead to believe, “Waving flag” or “Wavin’ flag” depending on the version, of which there are bloody millions. Not all versions are equal either. The one I want is the one that has the line “now wave your flag” repeated during the chorus. The versions I have downloaded thus far have an alternative lyric at this point which makes the song unfit for purpose in my view. Unfortunately the preview for many versions of this song on iTunes does not include the chorus so it’s difficult to tell which version I want.

Undeterred and unwilling to blindly download version after version looking for the one I want I simply asked Google. Google pointed me at YouTube who confirmed I wasn’t making this version of the song up and gave me an artist name. iTunes said no. This is what we would describe as “a bit of an arse” and will necessitate me procuring the track from elsewhere, possibly ‘borrowing’ it from YouTube as I think I have the tools to turn it into an mp3 from a YouTube video

¹Self imposed rule. The Zozo has not made any such proclamations but I bet you she’s glad I have