Good Weekend: Math rock and the hotdog eating octopus

YYYYYYAAAAAAYYYYY!!! This was an extra good weekend! With Friday and Monday being public holidays this one was twice as long as weekend's usually are.

As I mentioned last week there were way too many cool things going down on Thursday night. Personally I really enjoyed the party that we landed up at, The Tutus show at Tings.

I really, really love playing Tings. And it's not just because I get an awesome free meal when I do. The crowd is just always so receptive and up for a good time, something that was fantastically clear by the contorted dancefloor that the Tutus worked up over the course of their set. Needless to say taking over from where they left off was more than a pleasure. I played a power half hour set, Joe took over from me to do the same and then we rocked the rest of the evening head to head. Awesome times.

Friday and Saturday were both pretty chilled, highlighted by more Asian food, more moleing and loads more chocobos. Honestly I can't really ask for more. On Sunday Anja and I went through to Pretoria to visit my family. On the way back we stopped off at Christian's place. He played us the 2 new Vampire 9000 recordings which are sounding seriously stellar. Since the original drummer Henre's left for China the band have followed a far less technical, more visceral direction, with the new songs sounding like a kind of wilder, dancier Errors. Too cool. Anja, Christian and I met up with Maaike to grab something to dinner at Kung Fu Kitchen. Zuba rad times followed. After dinner we dropped by Chritian's to quickly get a great new show called "Better off Ted" and then drove back to Joburg. I woke up pretty early yesterday morning, grabbed my keytar and macbook and drove through to Bryanston for a very special event. Yesterday marked the first ever practice for the, as yet untitled, collaboration between yours truly and the much loved champions of SA post rock - Eyes Like Mirrors. From when I first saw the band at We Own the Sky, I've been totally in love with a noise the boys rip out of their instruments. After seeing me playing visuals with Johnny Foreigner, Jason ELM asked me if I'd like to work with them on a visual set and ever since I've been dying to jam with the band. Yesterday it finally happened. While the collaboration is still in it's infancy it was awesome rocking out with the dudes yesterday. There's still a very long way to go in terms of getting all the imagery together, but at the moment I'm thinking the collaboration will take the form of a kind of re-envisioning of Metropolis (probably my favourite film from the silent era). So far I'm mostly creating visuals out of a bunch of way cool pastel drawings by Franci, the sister of ELM bassist Shannon. I haven't done much with these awesome pictures yet, but they're already looking great over ELM's music. Even with a very limited pallet of imagery to work with I had the best time playing with the band yesterday. It wasn't just the highlight of my weekend, but probably the past month or so. After righteous rocking out, loads of new music, 3D skateboarding, red tea and pizza I crawled through the rain back to Melville. Anja and I ate fantastic soup, invited Colin over to hang out and watched more than a 3rd of the entire season of Better off Ted. It's really really great. So great it knocked Anja unconscious, leaving Col and I free to fire up my X-Box and shoot the crap out of Skag till well past our bedtime. Pow!