Dub be good to me

[venta]

Blimey. With the exception of BAYD on Friday, I've done nowt but whinge on here for a week or so. Returning now to the usual channel with a gig review.

Oh, and as people keep reminding me, there hasn't been a photo competition on here for ages. Yes, I know that. One coming soon, promise.

Last Thursday zandev asked me who I was going down to the Zodiac to see. Salmonella Dub, I said. That didn't help, did it ? A New Zealand reggae band, I explained.

It wasn't until I said that out loud that I realised what a preposterous concept it was. A reggae band. From New Zealand.

Salmonella Dub were one of my great finds when I was out there in 2003, found simply by walking into a friendly-looking independent record shop and demanding recommendations for local bands. Incidentally, this is a great tactic even in the UK. It's a non-starter in your HMVs and Virgins, but find a proper record shop with a real person behind the counter and they'll probably be delighted to plug their top favourites. The bloke who runs Folk Devils in Whitby looks up to see me and says "Oh, it's you. Buy this." these days. But I digress.

I was too late to catch most of the support acts, but arrived just as YT came on stage. YT turned out to be strangely mismatched bloke doing rather ill-advised dub-style rap over a backing track. On the plus side, he did surprise me, as I've never heard phrases like "the Blackbird Leys lovin' family" uttered onstage before. His whole stage act seemed somewhat amateurish, and I would have expected him to be fourth down the bill. Still, he good a good reception so maybe I was just missing something.

If I take a SpamAssassin approach to reviewing bands, and award points for various different positive things, then Salmonella Dub come out pretty highly. You get points for a singing drummer (no reason, I just like it), points for multiple vocalists, points for non-standard instruments (sax, trumpet, trombone), points for people who swap instruments (or, in one notable case, play the saxophone and the bongos at the same time), points for multiple drummers. They get points for their Radio4-like approach to percussion - that is, if you're not doing anything with your hands right now, pick up some maraccas or something (incidentally, I mean Radio4 the band, not the BBC people). And they get points for being so damn varied.

I know basically bugger-all about reggae or dub, and thus am a bit lacking in vocaublary to describe them effectively. They do gentle tracks with slow, mellow brass sections and more upbeat instrumental numbers whose short, sharp blasts from trumpet and sax act more like percussion. Sometimes the lyrics tumble out like a fast rap, and some of the songs get carried away on their two-man drum lines to become more like dance music. Just when you think they've got to be out of surprises, the keyboard player picks up an acoustic guitar and they bring out a dead-straight reggae track.

And all to an LCD projection backdrop of weird video montages, short film clips and bits of NZ scenery.

I've seen a lot of bands at the Zodiac, and I've never felt the floor bounce like that; people were dancing like bastards. What with Salmonella Dub belonging on the other side of the world, they don't get over here much. But I'd very much recommend going to see them if you get the chance.

I was about to go crazy and experiment with this tagging lark, since it'd actually be quite useful to, say, see all gig reviews at a go. But that apparently means swapping to S2, and most of the S2 styles look really ugly. Guess I'll be writing my own then. I'll see you in a few weeks when I've re-emerged from the masses of documentation. And if the journal stays looking like this... well, I guess it beat me :)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

or, in one notable case, play the saxophone and the bongos at the same time

Sounds more like some kind of challenge mode on Donkey Konga than anything to do with real world music !

[venta.livejournal.com]

Is that real (world music) or (real world) music :)

[zotz]

I did actually see someone play the guitar and keyboard at the same time. Quite literally. By pressing the keys with the head of the guitar while strumming it. It was Howe Gelb, of Giant Sand, who is clearly a very odd man indeed.

S2 styles

[wimble.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I'm using component, and it doesn't look to me as though that, or classic are too different from your current setup.

Although, of course, that's based on a 3 second glance, so there may be crudities I'm completely missing ;-)

Re: S2 styles

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, my decision not to like them was based on a 3 second glance, too. It's entirely possible I could have got something I liked just by tweaking colours/fonts/etc in one of the existing ones. But with a bit of luck trying to do my own will at least persuade me to get on with learning CSS.

Re: S2 styles

[wimble.livejournal.com]

S2 has more capabilites than just using CSS, which, too be honest I've never looked at needing. For example, Component allows the journal owner to customize the fonts and colours within the system, and the list of extra "bits" down the side of the page (hence the name).

Whether you could dump the expandability of S2 and make a customised unique version just for yourself, and just using CSS, I don't know (having never examined it).

To be honest, my CSS learning came from trying to figure out presentation for XML files (formatting OED entries): this gave me the advantage of being able to define my structure, tags and style, all in one go. Applying it to HTML, I actually find harder, because I'm stuck with the HTML elements for defining the structure.

Re: S2 styles

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

because I'm stuck with the HTML elements for defining the structure.

Not really, since divs and spans with class attributes are sufficient to invent arbitrary semantics. And you only need span because there are places in HTML where div is illegal - if you used no actual HTML elements at all then you could get by quite handily by pretending that you're using freeform XML, except writing <div class="flibble"> in place of <flibble>.

In practice, that sort of thing can get messy quite quickly, but if you have structures in your pages which really can't be sensibly described in HTML, then that's what it's there for.

Re: S2 styles

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Yes, that crossed my mind while writing the reply, but for brevity, I decided to omit it, and allow somebody (I figured you or bateleur as the likely candidates) to bring it up, thus changing my monologue into a dialogue.

Yes, I could use <div class="H1"> as a direct replacement for <H1> and so forth, but if I do that then it misbehaves for users who don't enable stylesheets, and potentially for users who's style sheet implementation is problematic. In general, I'd rather use HTML elements for styling if they exist, and can be coaxed to perfection with further style, but work ok without that extra styling, rather than raw div and span with a fuller reliance on stylesheets. I'm not sure what the idealogical positions on this should be.

Re: S2 styles

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I could use <div class="H1"> as a direct replacement for <H1> and so forth, but if I do that then it misbehaves for users who don't enable stylesheets

Depends what you mean by "misbehaves" - it prints it alone on a line, which is almost as good as you'd ever get on a text terminal (short of piping it through "banner"). However, this brings up another reason (which I forgot earlier) for mixing div and span - even on an abacus that will at least let you dictate where the hard linebreaks go. Add p and you can do paragraph breaks too, add headings and you've got a proper document, and anchors and it's hyper, add images and it's multimedia. Beyond this you may have to start accepting HTML's ideas of what a document "is".

But I'm not really advocating the use of div in place of suitable HTML structures, I'm advocating liberal use of them for whatever semantics it is you felt didn't fit into HTML at all. If they're all that weird, it's unlikely that you'd be able to use HTML to do anything that degrades when CSS is disabled without losing any information at all, so you might as well go for it. Without a concrete example, though, I can't say anything other than generally. It's probably quite easy to do something dumb this way, and there are edge cases like a sequence of characters input into a television remote, which you'd like to mark up with <span class="tv">, but for reasons of no-style browsers you will probably have to settle for <code class="tv">.

I'm not sure what the idealogical positions on this should be.

I'd say, according to circumstances, either:

1) Do something with (HTML Strict)+CSS that plays nicely with known browsers, degrades OK without styles and on lynx, and that is as semantic as you feel you can manage given those constraints. It won't be an ideal abstract data representation, but it's better than postscript.

Or,

2) Use XML+CSS and demand that users have a real browser. Make your document purely semantic, and add XSLT if your XML doesn't naturally lend itself to a form directly stylable with CSS. Hire an accessibility consultant if you're dealing with the public. If someone is just using old technology, then that's too bad - what if they didn't have a computer at all, then how would your content look? eh? eh?

Or,

3) Put your data in a database, and use your server to generate views in whatever nasty or nice formats seem appropriate for particular cases. If some particular browser causes problems, patch it up with sticky tape.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Styles will work without swapping your journal to S2, but they display in a style not of your choosing. See, for instance, http://www.livejournal.com/users/addedentry/tag/sex

[venta.livejournal.com]

So...er... how do I tag things, then ? I can't work this out. Maybe I just haven't found the relevent of the FAQ yet.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The FAQ: http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=227

In short, it read that tags can only be viewed using S2. I've just changed mine journal to S1 (and back again).

Under S2, I can see tags from both my journal, and on my friends page. Under S1, I can't.

However, under S1, I can read the tags when viewing specific entries (they appear at the top of the entry). And I can also set tags: see the five icons at the top of the entry? Previous, add to Memory, Edit, Tag and Next.

[(Anonymous)]

You get points for a singing drummer (no reason, I just like it)

At once I thought of Phil Collins and wondered why you might possibly like the idea. But google returns a surprising wealth of information for "singing drummer", including books on technique and ads by bands wanting just that. Now all I need to do is get rid of the image of Phil Collins before my entire afternoon is spoiled by blandness.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

I will sign in before posting. I will sign in before posting. I will sign in before posting. I will sign in before posting. I will sign in before posting. I will sign in before posting.

Dub be good to me.

Ooh, ooh - the title's in the quote. I can get this one.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Damn. Yeah. I never think of him.

[paste.livejournal.com]

oooh, hello! i've just added you cos someone said you post mp3s, i love people like you. then i noticed the abundance of nz tunes all over the place & was going to ask what/how/why... and oxford? but this post has answered the question for me.

hi, i'm sarah & i actually am from nz & weirdly enough i'm living in shropshire at the moment. i went to see salmonella dub in london on sunday & while they were pretty good, the venue was totaly rubbish. it was in the shepherds bush empire which is an old theatre with balconies. we were unfortunately sitting on one of hte balconies... sitting! it sucked big time, we had to dance in front of our seats where there wasn't much space to do anything but bend your knees occasionally. grrrr.

that said, i saw SD play in builth wells last year in a smaller venue & it was a much better show, much tighter & more intimate & so much more room for dancing! i'm with you in loving the bongos/sax man, he's my favourite by far.

ohhh, i'm rambling. i just wanted to say hi! if you're ever in need of some new nz tunes, i've got lots eh, just gimme a yell.

x.sarah

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aye up. Come on in.

I only actually post one mp3 a week, and it's mainly to encourage people to go and buy albums they might not know about :)

A friend of mine from university was a kiwi studying, and then working, over here for getting on for seven years. He introduced me to loads of big NZ bands, plus local bands from Wellington (where he grew up), and Dunedin (he went to Otago).

My only gripe is that it's really hard to find CDs over here, even of quite well-known NZ bands.

I'm always open to recommendations of new bands, though - particularly since I found a good mail order company (www.smokecds.com). (Or at least, I had but that page doesn't seem to want to load right now :( )

Shepherds Bush isn't too bad as a venue, really, but yeah - you want to be standing downstairs, not up in the circle!

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

It seems to work now, but your link is not quite right. Try this (http://www.smokecds.com/).