The end of Malty Media (no. 4, anyway)

Wednesday night turned out really well, from a somewhat inauspicious start. Caught up in the small matter of buying a house, I got there half an hour late! Genius.

Stu played some super-early Kraftwerk material, The Black Dog and a great tune from Thomas Fehlmann's album from last year, Hönigpumpe, deigning to "welcome" me with Jean-Michel Jarre.

The night moved forward in a fairly cheery mode from there on in, taking in more dubby ambient techno, a healthy swathe of semi-improvised variations on our own works in progress, and a few obscure Japanese tunes from the 80s walking that line between synth disco and new age.

The highlights for me were generally those moments where things started to work so seamlessly that both of us began to lose track of who was contributing what to the mix.
It was nice to have some space in the mix as well - we had what felt like quite a lengthy passage of a recording of frogs in Vietnam with nothing else happening, plus a very long passage of one of Douglas Lilburn's electro-acoustic pieces that just burped and whizzed away with that huge dynamic range that is only acceptable outside pop music, away from the volume wars.

Probably hubris to write the following, but the Lilburn piece worked excellently after our own "Flakiest"! (MP3 here) "The crumbliest, flakiest chocolate in the world!" echoing off from the histrionic jungle pisstake, a moment of silence, and then the quietest, purest synth tones starting to creep forth into the room. Seems that despite wilful eclecticism generally being a terrible approach, this kind of absurd contrast can be a great thing.

We wrapped up with a few contemporary synth-disco numbers: Kelley Polar, Morgan Geist with the singer from the Junior Boys, and another great track from Pierre Omaar's Contretemps.