Long time, no see.

[kneeshooter]

Most of you will be relieved to see there's no pictures in this post. Rather I'm just getting some text out of my system before embarking on more adventures in photoland. I'll make decent use of cut tags so you don't have to actually read it...

Last weekend was of course Infest. You've seen the photos, possibly bought the t-shirt and, if you're vin_petrol bemoaned the lack of corsetted lovelies in modern EBM. I had, as I've hinted in various places, a wonderful time. I took nearly 2000 photos, I danced a bit, I ate junk food, I got hyper on cheap chocolate and I wondered why people don't make sense of noize. I made a point of seeing every band, which rather bemused many some other people there, and meant I wasn't as sociable as I could have been so I clearly need to go back to working on the compromise of social crutch vs real interaction in the future. In general I enjoyed the noize more than the electro this year, which was a change as if I'd been forced to make a choice before the event it would have been the other way around.

Nice to see everyone I saw, but special mentions to quondam, kantti and ant_girl (for Ian McEwan).

In order of appearance - my thoughts on the bands:

• Univaque - I'll damn them by saying they were ok. Nothing at all special about them.
• Pow[d]erpussy - Not bad. I didn't especially get on with Ah Cama-Sotz last year, but he worked better with a friend.
• Fixmer/McCarthy - Good, old fashioned industrial sounds. Could have done without the "dancer" (who was probably a walking advert for the "just say no!" campaign) but was good to have Nitzer Ebb back (in effect).

• Tin Omen - Woo! Local boys made good. I'd heard a small number of MP3s and thought it was a good, if retro sound. I enjoyed them, but I don't think they're modern enough to go anywhere.
• The Azoic - Seemed like lovely people with good crowd technique but, like Univaque, just didn't set me on fire muscially.
• HIV+ - The Infest programme, as quondam was a work of genius, and completely befuddled me with respect to HIV+. I didn't know what to expect, but once I'd turned off the brain, and started to feel the sounds I enjoyed it.
• Decoded Feedback - Enjoyed them. They seem nicely positioned between Industrial and EBM, and I shall look out for more.
• Punch Inc - Ok but were one of the weaker "man-behind-box" acts for me.
• Covenant - They're like Manuskript but EBM right? Yeah - they've got some crowd pleasing tunes, but are more fluff than substance live.

• Deviant UK - Very! Shouty! For! Sunday! Afternoon! Enjoyable, but won't got anywhere. See Tin Omen above.
• Final Selection - Noooooo! I thought they were really, really dull. A suit does not make a man.
• Iris - Had been massively trailled to me by various people, but in the end they get a "competent but not my thing" award. And people keep telling me the lead singer is cute but clearly not my type.
• KiEw - Very enjoyable. Quite rough, but engaging, amusing, and downright scary.
• Blutengel - Look! We can play the same song 15 times and no-one will notice as long as the soft-core vampire pr0n keeps going on. Amusing to watch - for a bit - then got dull.

See - I'll never make a music journalist. Although in my defence this is the heavily distilled version. As each day passed without me doing this write-up my thoughts got more condensed. Any longer and I would have just resorted to a star rating.

In other news (I'll save more rants for later) I almost collided with a van on Friday. This was entirely due to the driver being a complete cock. Imagine the situation - you're driving along a road, there's a cyclist in front of you. You need to turn left. Do you:

1. Slow down, let the cyclist pass the turning, costing you a good 10 seconds of delay.
2. Accelerate past the cyclist, brake suddenly and turn across his path forcing him to brake suddenly and risk losing control on a main road.

Yep - you guessed it...

Oh, and now I know why there is a groove in the saddle on my bike.