Surfing is Good

The surf is absolutely cracking today in Sydney. I surfed a little known secret spot called Maroubra with a frothing pack of other dudes. I got a couple of fun ones and also got severely drilled duckdiving by a number of friendly bone rattling 4 foot peaks of doom. I love surfing in Autumn and winter when the winds switch after being onshore for days, and just like flicking a switch pretty much the whole east coast of Australia from the Victorian boarder to the Sunshine coast is pumping. There is something beautiful about the cool water, the smell of salt, the crisp mornings and the thrill of clean thumping waves that makes me feel alive at a cellular level. Well time for breakfast, my beyonce is back from a high rolling ski trip to Europe paid for extremely generously by her bestie Caria-Canaria.

Eat now, then more waves, then DJ Markie later for some Brazilian infused D & B warmth.

Good times.

Logistics Reality Checkpoint

I have this album on heavy rotation at the moment. I recently discovered Logistics by subscribing to Hospital records excellent podcast produced by Hospitals boss Tony Colman (aka London Elektricity who is also wicked producer and funny d'n b geezer). Anyway I decided to lash out and by this album on Beatport and it is fricken wicked. It features some nice big slabs of warm bass and wicked tight drum pattern production. To me the album is all killer with very little filler.

If you like well produced beats check logistics myspace in the link above or subscribe to hospitals podcast as it's generally more hit than miss and Tony digs shapeshifter which means he's OK in my books ;)

Salmonella Bud Dogs

My Mates The Sniffer Dogs supported Salmonella Dub last night at the Metro. It was a wicked Gig and and it was very cool to see the dogs playing a big venue. The dogs killed it and had the crowd moving and hopefully introduced some more people to their comedy/dub/reggae/riddim bizness. Bud Spells also supported and I liked some of their tunes although a couple of numbers veered towards being a dub steppy paranoid racket which is cool I guess (if you're into that kind of thing). They did rinse out a drum and bass number which I loved.

Salmonella Dub played a pretty laid back set that verged on kind of ambient dub. I didn't realise but Tiki Taane left the group a year ago which changed the dynamic in a live environment. They had a dude playing a sampler who I heard later was Paddy Free who is one half of electronic kiwi producers pitch black . It sounds like he has influenced Salmonella Dubs sound as it has taken an ambient, repetitive almost trance like quality. I really liked the visuals these guys had during the show as it highlighted some of the finer points of New Zealands amazing landscape and nature. At one point I wondered if the visuals had been commissioned by Tourism NZ.

Anyway all in all it was a good gig with more than one mad kiwi dub fan moving to the beat...

Click ads grow trees with Ecocho

Some smart people I work with have just launched a search engine called Ecocho which is basically an "eco" search engine. How it works is that for every 1000 searches on Yahoo (via Ecocho) and every 2000 searches on Google (again via Ecocho) up to 2 trees will be planted via a carbon offsetting partner. A few people at TechCrunch have been bagging it out but from what I've seen all offsetting/tree planting is audited by KPMG so the process is legit. In a nut shell if you search via ecocho you get the same results as Google & Yahoo but you can be confident that you are contributing to carbon offsetting which is admittedly not as good as carbon reduction but its a step in the right direction. Anyway check it out its as valid a place to search as any of the other engines.

Later

Blogger gimcrackery

Yes if you are reading this occasionally you may notice that my post about Portugal disappeared. I am having problems with Blogger and It looks like (semi skilled) hacks I made to the code of a surfing mag photo gallery farked the pagination of everything else. I guess I just gave some splogs free content. Anyway back to my hangover and tinkering. Will. Post. Soon.