Things are moving.

New music! New gig! But first a few words…

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

A page in history

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.

The sinster Mr VB Bakerman speaks…

… giving his own audio-visual account of the Vostok Lake / Scarlett Lashes tour. It’s hilarious and makes me sound much cooler than I actually am. Including pictures, the best of which I will snaffle and put on the website at my convenience.

Some thoughts from the tour…

Vostok Lake is not easy-listening or feel good music. It is challenging listening and feel-alive-for-the-first-time-in-years music. Vostok Lake is not a fashion accessory, or will not reassure you that everything is just fine. It is music of danger, challenge, defiant individuality and high standards. Vostok Lake may annoy you or piss you off, but it will never be forgettable or ignorable.

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.

Hidden: a gender

One of the more disturbing things about the Rampage of the South was the number of audients who felt the need to ask me “are you a man or a woman”? When you’re standing there in a bustier, short pants, fishnets and thigh-high boots and some people are not quite picking up the gender signals, it does make you a little worried about your self-declared femininity. I tried a number of responses to this:

- “well, I’m certainly more of a man than you are.”
- “which would you prefer?”
- “buy a CD and I’ll tell you”
- “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours”.

But none of those felt entirely convincing. This might just be a backwoods of the South Island thing – but I don’t know that no-one in Auckland or Wellington isn’t thinking it, just that they’re polite enough not to yell it out and not drunk enough to approach the performer after the gig.

But one audient in Milford Sound had a way of putting it that I found much more pleasant: “You know who you remind me of? Vince Noir from The Mighty Boosh.”

"Heart beats fast like a tiny machine."

And of course that’s a massive compliment. The Boosh’s act is, of course, comedy written by and about musicians, and of course we all love Gary Numan (who’s not only a pop star, but he has a pilot’s licence. Imagine that!)

“I am Electro Boy. I am Electro Girl. I am the Great Confuser. Is it a man? Is it a woman? Oooh, I’m not sure I mind…”

But… yeah. Vostok Lake is clearly tapping into that vein of glam-rock androgyny and genderfuck which goes back to David Bowie… hell, further back, to Little Richard. Even Kate Bush wrote her songs from a male point of view occasionally – eg. her cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” which doesn’t change the words at all.

So be it. Deliberate gender blur (thank you Kate Bornstein) is now an acknowledged part of the Vostok Lake experience. We are, after all, a cyborg act. Computers don’t have gender. In the 22nd century, the future of Weightless Music, gender will be optional. Let’s make it happen.

A list of injokes/memes from our South Island tour

A small list of references that only three people in the world will get, but those three people will laugh insanely at for hours:

Wishy-washy

Paranoid look

Going up into the mountains

Gerry the General

Caroline the Cougar

Fritz the Pokey-man

Dog/weka whispering

EATS

What’s the haps?

Dorita and Mardotha Go To The Supermarket (commentate a rugby match, teach a pre-school class, etc etc etc…)

ALL RIGHT HERE’S THE NEWS

Right. Now that we’re back from the South Island Rampage (thank you Scarlett Lashes for a great time) it seems timely to update the Vostok Lake web presence. Priority 1 will be starting to blog here, rather than at that deplorable hive of scum, villainy and advertising known as MySpace. Unfortunately it seems to be a hassle coupled with a burden to just export from a MySpace blog, so I will just start blogging here and see how that works.

The plan for now is to update the website something serious. The idea behind this is that Vostok Lake needs to connect with the lovely people we met in the South Island – and those other lovely people who support our music from overseas, or elsewhere outside cycling distance of the inner suburbs of Auckland. One big idea that we want to work with is demo-blogging - that is, on a regular basis (once a month?) we will post a demo of one of the new songs which aren’t formally available yet. The first priority, is of course, “Office Work”, which is the big hit single out there on the circuit.

However, we’re also planning a proper release of that as an actual single. People keep saying the album is dead, so we’ll experiment with this one. The plan will be for a proper, high-quality version of “Office Work” – distinct from any demo we blog – backed with perhaps a live version of one of our other popular favourite… and also accompanied by an actual music video. Would you guys pay for a little CD with all of those on it? Please comment and let me know.

Apart from that, the broader questions are:

1) where shall we play live next? Are there compatible venues in Auckland for what we do, or do we have to start our own?

2) is it time for VL to make certain compromises with the culture industry in the hopes of getting noticed by a wider audience? We’re not talking “going mainstream”, but we are talking “streamlining the meme so that people who aren’t quite as cool as the existing fans get interested”.

Welcome to WordPress. Please comment.