• “The most surreal night of my life” – Tim Batt
• “…the whole night was so perfect!!! Stand Up comic an all… so many people missed such a cool show…. what other gig is as sexy and insane?? None I have seen…” – Jarad Bryant of New Hang Ups

The next gigs:

• AUCKLAND, October 14: The Lucha Lounge, York Street, Newmarket. With Horatio Crane, Scarlett Lashes, Vostok Lake, comedy, burlesque and inexplicable dance moves.
• WELLINGTON, November 5: Bar Medusa, Vivian Street, CBD. With both imported and local content. That’s right, we’re taking the show on the road.

Our posters keep getting better.

Auckland’s #1 underground camp electronic variety night! An unscripted musical theatre total immersion experience, like the Muppet Show meets the Mighty Boosh IN A STEEL CAGE and the referee is the ghost of Bill Hicks.

Music from:

X-Ray Fiends
Scarlett Lashes (prepared to get whipped, rubbed and lashed by the queen of trash)
Vostok Lake (androgynous cyber power-prog-pop)
New Hang Ups (Macintosh computers and TRAMPOLINES)

Comedy from Tim Batt, the terror of the Classic Comedy Theatre!

Burlesque from the sextacular Dolly Destory and the spanklicious Miss Phloss.

Performances from:

Erika Strata (Lady Gaga does opera! Truly remarkable)
Sarah Houboult and Edward (sensual Kama Sutra adagio acrobatics)

MC the Divine Mizz Kita Mean (Princess to Queen winner 2010, the Hostess with the Mostest, larger than life and twice as natural)

$10 on the door. It just gets better all the time. You know you want it.

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Not much else to report. Hoping to debut one new song at the above gig; working on a composition in “dots”, doing a kind of Frank Zappa electronic-classical thing. We’ll see how it works.

Our really bad-ass poster

A new song will be debuted, but probably what you’re most interested is #2 in our (not even close to being regular) series of Demoblogs. Next up the list will probably be “Cut and Run”, a song I wrote as a curse. I think it worked.

• “Unpredictable, entertaining and funny night! Well done. In a word, it was saucy.”
• “That was a seriously trippy experience.”

We’ll update this post as more come in. Also stay tune for news of Salon 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Rodney Dangerfield described Bill Hicks as “so far ahead of his time, his parents haven’t met yet”. I would be so flattered if that were ever applied to Vostok Lake. Now, you see, the thing about Bill’s act is that he was angry and intolerant of bullshit, but he was also fundamentally kind-hearted. I believe that that’s precisely the right posture for any revolutionary. (Although perhaps we’re all scared that if we are as strong and loving and intolerant of bullshit as we want to be, they might fix onto us with their Cancer Death Ray, like they did to Bill and possibly Frank, or just shoot us in the head or crucify us or give us strokes or all of those other things that our culture tells us happen to true revolutionaries.)

Bill Hicks as drawn by Steve Dillon in "Preacher"

Anyway. We promised ages ago that we’d try to blog a demo of a new Vostok Lake song every month, and we finally got around to doing the first one:

“Office Work is Fucking Boring” (subtle title there, folks) was first written in 2007/8, thereabouts, when I was working a really soul-destroying hideous job, as opposed to the relatively nice job I have for the time being. I was reading Pluto Press’ Big Red Songbook – in case you missed the memo, Vostok Lake is a left-wing institution, and we are also interested in folk music, in the sense of “the songs of our people”, “creativity from below”, “sisters and brothers doin’ it for themselves”, etc, rather than the specific style of acoustic guitar music. So I was reading this book full of the songs of the loves and lives and struggles of agricultural workers, coal miners, car workers, even chemical plant workers, and I thought… where are the songs of my people, the white-collar office workers?

The answer, of course, was that I had to write it. The first time I performed it, a prominent local leftist journalist jumped to his feet, applauded and yelled “Screw Joe Hill!” (“Office Work…” is at least more upbeat.) But it has quickly become one of the most popular songs at all of my gigs – even the ones in the South Island where I don’t think they’ve even heard of offices. Because it’s true, although fictional. We are looking to recording this properly and putting it out as a single. This is folk music for the next century, people.

And in other news… The Electric Salon is finally happening. We got sick of waiting for people in Auckland to provide suitable venues for “cyborg folk music” and other weird art, so we’re starting our own. If you, the audience make it a success, there will be more, perhaps at the same venue, perhaps sometime better. Perhaps even on a weekend.

Where: Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Road, Auckland.
When: Doors open 8:30, Thursday April 28, 2011.
Who: Swampy Tonk, Vostok Lake, Scarlett Lashes and the Pseudo Dancers, Benny Profane, et al.
What: Music, drag, burlesque, poetry, gender blur, visual effects, radical cultural politics, lotsa larfs & sex.
How much: $10

Daphne of Vostok Lake (right) plus hot groupie

It is mildly disconcerting to go to a museum and to see a large picture of oneself on the wall.

To give context: I was invited to The Charlotte Museum in Mt Albert for the dual launch of a book and film about New Zealand lesbian music, particularly that from the 1980s. The film, Our Own Music was extremely interesting, although a bit depressing at parts, in that there seems to have been such a fun and interesting “wimmin’s music” scene in Auckland about 10 years before I would have been old enough to play a part in it. Never mind. Perhaps the Weightless Music / Electronic Salon scene might be able to cover some of the same ground.

The book, a small pamphlet / guidebook on lesbian recording artists, featured yours truly, although funnily enough nothing about Vostok Lake – the entry was based almost entirely on an interview I did with the late lamented UP magazine in 2003. A lot of stuff on Esperanto, interestingly enough. The cover of Undinal Songs was part of the cover art of the booklet. It was a pity they couldn’t talk more about VL, although a couple of photos from the VL era were used as illustration – and one of them (the very photo that’s on the front page of the website) was also on a wall display.

Vostok Lake can be seen to the upper right of this wall display. A legend in our own lunchtime.

It’s interesting, I don’t actually see what I do as “lesbian music”. Okay, I am a chick-who-digs-chicks, and it’s certainly queer music, but you certainly don’t have to be gay in any serious way (or female in any sense at all) to dig Vostok Lake. We’re interested in gender blur in its wider connotations, though, as mentioned below. But certainly it seems that I need to pay more attention to the dykey section of my fanbase.

Top marks for the work of the Charlotte Museum. A formal announcement on the debut of the Electric Salon should be out this week.

We want to change the way that music is made and received live, just like the Internet has done for recordings. If you listen to Vostok Lake you are becoming part of a movement. If you pay Vostok Lake money so we can do this more often and with better equipment – or, better yet, form your own project with which we can pool resources and collaborate – then you are a leader of that movement.