You can find more details, and buy tickets, here:

http://www.londonwordfestival.com/?p=1257

and the venue, here:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a&q=st+leonard’s+church,+E1+6JN&ie=UTF8&hq=st+leonard’s+church,&hnear=London+E1+6JN,+UK&ll=51.526395,-0.077548&spn=0.010106,0.027788&z=16&iwloc=A&cid=14478587937091126271

If you haven’t downloaded your free copy of The Sound of the Ladies’ “…sing songs about space” EP, you can do so here:

http://thesoundoftheladies.bandcamp.com/album/sing-songs-about-science-and-knowledge-volume-1-some-songs-about-space

And that way, you can sing along to all the songs when you come to the gig. Sweet.

You can find the venue here, and the night also features Cellar Door and Will Stevens. See you there!

You can listen to the podcast here

Download audio file (23-Department_of_Homeland_Security.mp3)

or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.

This is the last you’ll hear from me for a couple of weeks, as I sojourn in the US – but I’ll be sure to note points of interest at @martinaustwick on Twitter. So far, Mount St Helens (which erupted on my second birthday, fact fans), the shooting locations for Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure (Snoqualmie, North Bend and Roslyn, WA) and any shops stocking the Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins are on my “to do” list. Any other suggestions gratefully accepted.

But attitudes are changing. Do people increasingly see recorded music as something you don’t pay for? If that’s true,  free no longer means valueless. Well I’m not so sure. I love live music, but I love recorded music too and it would be a shame if it just became an advert for the gig* (as many have suggested). If people responded to the decline of the film industry by saying theatre will cover the shortfall, you’d think they were nuts. Well, what I want and what the world wants are two different things, but I think there are enough people who enjoy recorded music and want to support independent artists to keep us indies going. I suspect I’m about to find out…

So. The Radiohead model. Pay as much as you like. But do download! Do share it with people you think might enjoy it, do come along to gigs and buy the mug, but most of all… do have a listen. And then do tell me what you think.
* incidentally, I know maybe one or two acoustic musicians who ever get paid for gigs – and they are very successful and/or very niche

Download audio file (22_-_Disco_2000.mp3)

or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.

In other news, music blog Large-hearted Boy has included my top ten albums of the noughties in a (admittedly large) roundup of such end-of-year lists -  so thanks to them. There’s also a nascent campaign to make The Sound of the Ladies Xmas number 1 in 2010. For the usual x-factor hating reasons. Now, I don’t agree with all of this blogger’s arguments about why the Rage Against the Machine Number 1 was an epic fail, but I’m up for a Christmas #1. Let’s do this, people.

Not a controversial choice. The debut from Montreal’s finest managed to sound like Godspeed You! Black Emperor playing stadium rock. With much, much better lyrics. It’s hard to think of any other band so histrionic and triumphalist that I would give the time of day to – but somehow Arcade Fire manage to make both of those things utterly compelling. If I knew how, I’d bottle it.

A break-up album, a concept album, an alt. folk album which sounds like Pixies as often as Bright Eyes (thankfully), produced by Grandaddy’s Jason Lyttle, and built around a core of such perfect melodicism and tender expression that it puts its peers (and most if his subsequent output) in the shade. Not a duff song on the record.

His last (proper) album, and the one where he final synthesized the scuzzy melacholy of Either/Or and his earlier albums with the sheeny bigshot production of XO.

Nixon (Lambchop)

Country band, soul group or artists chronicling the minutiae of American experience, what people don’t usually mention is that they’re really patchy. This overblown, high energy, polished soulfest is the exception to test the rule. Full of acerbic observations (”This learning not to demonstrate your asinine and callous traits, it could take some practice – I know”) from singer Kurt Wagner’s laconic baritone and strained falsetto, grand and melodramatic strings and foot tapping grooves, it’s the only Lambchop album I love. And to be honest, the only I can listen to from soup to nuts.

The Milk-eyed Mender (Joanna Newsom)

If your first reaction to Joanna Newsom’s voice isn’t ‘God that’s annoying’, then you’re lacking hearing in the 1-20kHz range. If your second, third and fourth reactions aren’t ‘but this is amazing’ then you’re an idiot. She’s like Bjork but with songs. And what amazing lyrics. I’ve chosen her debut album because I’m getting pretty old and if I put on Ys I will probably be long gone before the first “song cycle” finishes.

Tallahassee (The Mountain Goats)

You know on long flights when the captain will occasionally draw your attention to a point of interest by saying “And if you look out of your window to the left, you’ll be able to see Rekjavik” and you look out of the window and you realised you’ve completely missed it? If you ever have that experience with Florida’s state capital, you’ve spent too long there. It’s a city whose only claim to fame is electoral fraud. This has little to do with The Mountain Goats’ dark tale of a husband and wife who move there to drink one another to death, but Context is King and all that. No Children must be in the running for “most triumphantly misanthropic song of all time”. Amazing and strangely cathartic.

Rain On Lens (Smog)

Bill Callahan has gone all touchy-feely since this early noughties squally gem,  full of characteristicly wry humour and uncharacteristically tenacious grooves. Lyrics about lecherous fence painters vie with matter of fact musings on the mind/body duality on this massively overlooked masterpiece. Supper can get fucked.

Original Pirate Material (The Streets)

Because I am street. You youngsters probably don’t remember when bands weren’t all called “The something-or-others”, but around 2001 there was a big rash of the bastards, so much so that it got rather irritating. The only The bands worth listening to back then were The Strokes and The Streets. Look, the alternative was shit like The Datsuns and The Vines and The Thrills and – what do you mean you’ve never heard of them? I remember when this was all fields we had to make our own fun in those days etc.

Boxer (The National)

I don’t know what to say about this beguiling collection of enigmatic songs. Boxer feels to me like Stephin Merrit singing Paul Auster short stories set to the music of Interpol. Perhaps this is because I neither understand the fiction of Paul Auster nor the music of The National. I am endlessly drawn back to the disappointment of Mistaken for Strangers (”You wouldn’t want an angel watching over/ Surprise, surprise, one wouldn’t want to watch/ another uninnocent elegant fall/into the unmagnificent lives of adults”) and the refrain of Racing Like a Pro (”You’re dumbstruck, baby, now you know”). A deceptively simple album which belies it’s graceful sophistication.

This is my own personal way of dealing with it all (Superman Revenge Squad)
The best Croydon-based, Iron Maiden covering antifolk singer-songwriter out there at the moment, bar none. It turns out growing up in Croydon was a lot like growing up in Telford- and David Lynch, Smashing Pumpkins and King of Comedy are the only escape from the drudgery of suburbia; or indeed, one’s own existential angst. Just don’t mention Kerouac. He’s not a fan.

Honourable Mentions
Things we lost in the fire (Low)
1000 Hurts (Shellac)
The Argument (Fugazi)
69 love songs (The Magnetic Fields)
Do Dallas (McClusky)
Small Moments (David Kitt)
Yanqui Uxo (Godspeed you! Black emperor)
SmileSunset (Mark Mulcahy)
Rabbit Songs (Hem)

..and my senility has caught up with me and I can’t remember any more. Till the next decade.

I thought it’d be nice, for people who wanted to delve a bit more into the science, if I said a little bit more about the stories behind the tracks on “…Songs about Space…”. This is my simplified version of the Luminiferous Aether story -  if there are any astronomers reading who want to point out factual inaccuracies, they are most welcome to do so†.

At the end of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell had successfully created equations describing the wave motion of light, confirming the observations and theories of Christaan Huygens two centuries earlier. Scientists naturally wanted to know what the medium or material was that supported these waves; water waves travel through the sea, sound waves through air (or other fluid) and surely light must be the same? This hypothetical medium that supports the motion of light was named the luminiferous aether*, and would have some odd properties. For example, it must be completely invisible, or light would be refracted or absorbed by it rather than travelling freely. It also must be very widely present in the universe, because everywhere we look we see light propogating – but it cannot interact with matter (atoms and so on) or we would sense its effects on the things we see around us. So how do you detect something invisible and intangible?

Physicists Michelson and Morley designed an experiment to answer this question and detect the luminiferous aether. They used a device called an interferometer. Their interferometer worked by taking a beam of light and splitting it in two. Each beam then travelled along a separate ‘arm’, and were recombined at the end. Because of the wave nature of light, the recombined light is very sensitive to things like how far the light in each arm had travelled and how fast; any differences would produce interference in the final signal, hence interferometer.

Michelson and Morley ensured that both arms were exactly the same length, so if the speed of light is the same in both arms, there would be no interference. Even very small changes in the speed of light, however, would produce detectable interference. They reasoned that as the earth revolves around the sun, we must be experiencing some sort of motion through the aether, which varies with time. If the aether is ‘flowing’ in the direction the light is travelling, it will tend to slow down or speed up how quickly the light travels, and the interferometer will be able to detect that change. They designed their experiment so that one arm would lie in the direction of motion, and be subject to the ‘aether wind’, and the other arm perpendicular and would not be affected by the motion of the earth through the aether.

Without delving any further into the details of the experiment (which gets more technical and maths heavy from here), we can cut straight to the result – there was no detected change of the speed of light as a result of our motion through the aether. This effectively disproved the aether theory, although many people have tried unsuccessfully to find it with successively more sensitive equipment. More interestingly, the Michelson-Morley result is closely allied to the observation that ‘the speed of light is the same, independent of observer motion**’, the fundamental tenet of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, and the one which leads to all the wacky stuff with trains and clocks. This makes the Michelson and Morley result one of the great null results in scientific history.

†The full explanation of how the interferometry experiment worked is rather in-depth, so I have chosen not to elucidate it here. Wikipedia and the netwebs in general has more detailed explanations if your appetite is whetted…

*I’m afraid I mis-spelled it in my song. It should have been Luminiferous Aether and NOT Lumineferous Aether. They sound about the same out loud.

**In other words, no matter how fast you’re going, and no matter what direction the light is arriving from, it always appears to be travelling towards you at three hundred thousand km per second (approx). There are all sorts of caveats relating to inertial frames, but you can look those up if you’d like to find out more about Special Relativity and, indeed, general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravitation.

This was at the same time a labour of love and a massive rush to get it done on time. If you know anyone else who can sing songs from the Mikado with a full headcold, give them a record deal ferchrissakes. I’m off to to drink jack daniels in a misguided attempt to be able to breathe through my nose before Christmas. See you on the other side.

You can also download the “Live in Gipsy Hill” EP (full of non-science songs) – you’ll have to enter your email address, but I won’t send you loads of emails, I promise.

In December, I’m returning as a musician -  the theme then will be Space, so I have less than two weeks to write a set of songs on that theme (I have Lumineferous Aether from The School for Gifted Children, at least that’s a start). I’ve set myself the challenge of recording these as a little EP, and it’ll be available as an early Christmas present for anyone signed up (or signing up) to The Sound of The Ladies mailing list. Watch this space. Possible contenders at the moment include a song about the Voyager probe, and one about the plan to launch a space liner using atomic bombs that I just saw a BBC4 documentary about. And maybe a Stanislaw Lem tribute. But we will see.

The new me

I went to see post-rock (or instrumental/orchestral/chamber noise, whatever you fancy) septet The Monroe Transfer play at the Union Chapel yesterday. I hadn’t seen them play since I left the group about a year ago, so it was a real pleasure to see them in what seemed like their native habitat -  the Union Chapel, what a venue. New guitarist Peter Williams is a worthy replacement… and their new stuff is sounding really, really good. They’ve recorded a new album, which will have a lot of the new stuff on it, and they’re working with graphic artist Consumer Revolt on the packaging and artwork, which is looking amazing -  I heartily recommend getting a copy when it’s out in January.

In another nostalgia-inducing episode, Michael Caines (no, not that one) very kindly linked to The Sound of The Ladies Lounge on the homepage of his band, The Spirit of Play. Michael has a number of musical projects, as well as being a talented actor and arts journalist (makes you sick, right?), but the reason I know him is that he gave me my first musical break. That is to say, about ten years ago marked my debut public vocal performance, singing “Stars of Track and Field” by Belle and Sebastian in his band at the Jericho Tavern in north Oxford. You could very well blame him for all that’s happened since. In any case, he is a very talented writer and musician, and I would warmly encourage you to check out his music.

So, enough looking back. I have to write a set of songs about space for December’s Bright Club, so it’s futuristic all the way from now on. At least for the next 2 weeks. See you next decade!