The Thousands

We have this 'thing' in the studio where we tally up our editorial team's victories. We usually lose a lot but today we are chalking up the wins, so many wins we are now back up to zero again. It's been a good day! To celebrate we are going to go see Sun Araw tonight, Magazine tomorrow, Thee Oh Sees on Saturday, and Li Gang's exhibition next week. Think about that.

Cover photo by Jessica Stanley. Send yours to daniel@rightanglestudio.com.au and we'll give you a Schmacko!

Chuck Klosterman's latest novel features an almost invisible man named Y____, an unremarkable therapist named Victoria and a "heavy dude" named Zug, who seems to know an awful lot about 10th century Iceland.

The Visible Man is only the second piece of fiction from a bloke who normally pays his bills writing pithy essays about MTV's The Real World, rock n' roll odysseys or why the Unabomber wasn't entirely nuts. It's chockablock full of Klosterman's favourite things: music, drugs, longwinded treatises on the nature of mediated culture - but it is the unconventional structure that makes it worth reading.

The book is presented as a manuscript submitted for publication by Y____'s therapist. It's a series of transcripts, suppositions, extra-textual notes and self-reflective ponderings. The implausible nature of an almost invisible man is openly addressed, and a good portion of the tension lies in the fact that we are receiving an edited, second hand, potentially unreliable account of a thoroughly unbelievable story.

The Visible Man is a little bit sci-fi, a little bit experimental, and a lot bit readable.

Prince Rama hearts Sun Araw. Sun Araw hearts Prince Rama. The two bands are currently on tour together sound-tracking the summer of 2012. If you remember it, you weren't there. Taraka Larson from Prince Rama has been kind enough to spare some time from Hare Krishna chanting to review Sun Araw's latest album. Thanks, Taraka! We owe you a happy one.

Taraka Larson: If architecture is frozen music, then Ancient Romans is a sonic testament to the inverse; that music is a process of slowly unfreezing architecture.

There is a melting, a churning, a trans-mutating of stone to song, of song to sand, of sand to dust, of dust to ashes, of ashes to fire, of fire to smoke, and smoke to sunlight. At times, the clanging drums chisel away at the limestone slabs, the features of an unknown beloved slowly taking form in the petrified world of immortality. At other times, organs wash over the stonework, smoothing over any features that cling to identification, polishing their surfaces clean 'til they shine with a brilliance only the sun could inhabit.

The camera lense is tilted straight into the sunbeam, and each song draws the bright burning sphere closer and closer into focus. Look now and behold the eternal light but be blinded forever. Look away and be doomed to see only a stadium full of shadows. The choice is yours, and Ancient Romans does not presume to carry the answer. The needle passes over the record as the sun passes over the temple's oculus, igniting the interior in luminous resonance. Statues melt into song. Columns melt into golden silence. The record spins on the sacrificial altar, a lost lense.

How do you write a ‘review’ about a band you really love? Seriously, someone tell me and I’ll try to write you that review. But we’ll leave that to the smart guys; in the meantime here are some word-faps, because all I can tell you is that Carrion Crawler / The Dream EP is just so good, and that’s why this is just so hard.

This follow-up to the John Dwyer semi-solo effort Castlemania doesn’t drastically divert from the full roster Thee Oh Sees sound – that inimitable yelp of John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees have a cover band?) and the shared vocals of Brigid Dawson, not to mention the goddamn grooves of the rhythm section. But there are some subtle differences that at least I’ve never noticed before. Be nice, remember “smart guys”. I’m hearing kraut/space all up in this! ‘Wrong Idea’ is a straight up signature jam, but with an eerie space odyssey whistle. ‘The Dream’ is reverb drenched flat out garage fun underpinned by the introduction of mono-note kraut synth at the 2 minute mark that stretches it right out. ‘Chem-Farmer’ also features some tripped out atmospheres and ‘Crushed Grass’ gyrates away under blips, bleeps, and blams. Far out, it’s all so great.

So maybe those little things have been there all along and I truly ain’t one of the smart guys, or I’ve been listening to Thee Oh Sees through a particular ‘garage’ filter and have only just switched channels. That’s one of the best things about records; how they sound different at different times as you change. It’s a bona fide relationship, and while I'm probably way out of depth, I’m happy about mine with Thee Oh Sees.

Where Ian Fleming’s espionage is flip and glamorous, John Le Carré’s is dreary and cynical; George Smiley is the anti-James Bond. Still, director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) wrings unexpected elegance from the ugly ’70s using beautifully composed, observational shots and camera movements. In Alfredson’s hands, the MI6 offices – “the Circus” – become suffocating brown panopticons whose tea-sipping inhabitants scrutinise each other’s smallest gestures, squirming with fear that their secrets will come to light.

Control (John Hurt) suspects there’s a mole in the Circus when agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) is disastrously ambushed in Budapest. When rogue field agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) seems to confirm this news to his supervisor Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), retired spy George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is persuaded to unearth the mole. Who’s working for Soviet spymaster Karla – thuggish Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds)? Suave Bill Haydon (Colin Firth)? Conniving Percy Alleline (Toby Jones)? Or urbane Toby Esterhase (David Dencik)?

The plot’s intricate, but it unfurls lucidly, with plenty of tension and evocative micronarrative moments in which bewildered spies reveal the sacrifices and compromises they’ve made for their work. Perhaps the removal of Smiley’s final illusions makes him the perfect investigator.

Li Gang does all sorts of stuff - sculpture, painting, drawing, photography. His upcoming show at the aEaf, in the grey scale, is a touring photography show, travelling through both regional and metropolitan Australia. Like many, he is drawn to the analogue camera and the blurs, smears, scratches and splashes that happen in the processing of film.

Some like to dismiss the in vogue fascination with analogue photography, but as soon as you encounter the mysterious chemistry that quietly splashes in the darkroom you'll forget your judgements.

Li Gang is more selective than most darkroom wizards - he has an eye for the unusual image that is both a little too familiar and slightly jarring. Recalling oscillating traditional Chinese painted landscapes, Li Gang's images warp in out of stability, capturing satisfyingly sharp clarity only to grotesquely inflate and contort it.

Opening on the same night is the latest instalment in the odradek series - the aEaf's ongoing window project. First up in 2012 is Timothy Hodge - one of Adelaide's spiritual-psych-mess-set - whose dirty, colourful, sensory paintings and sculptures have been quietly bobbing adrift 'the scene' for the last two or three years.

Until now there have been only two kinds of wine racks: The oak wood kind your dad bought after watching Sideways. And the novelty kind, where the wine bottle morphs into a phallus (cue Italian waiter statue trying to carry his larger-than-life Pinot). No one had even considered the plight of cyclists. Cyclists who are trying to fulfill their dinner guest duties, riding down the highway like a Vin Diesel wannabe with one hand steering the bike, the other carrying a bottle of vino. It's an OH&S nightmare, but thanks to CycleStyle (our favourite Australian online bike-stuff shop) the solution is available: The Bicycle Wine Rack.

This new wine rack genus is hand made in Montreal by Oopsmark and, if you value living, it's the only way you can safely transport wine while cycling. It attaches to any 1" bike frame, securely clamps closed with an antique brass fastener and can adjust to fit various 3" bottles. You'd expect such a creation to look similar to the head gear contraption you wore in year seven, but instead it's made of olive oil-treated vegetable-tanned leather. The same ingredients Jerry Hall lathered onto her pregnant stomach in the '80s - so you know, it will age beautifully.

The cliched "what are the three things you would want if you were stranded on a desert island?" question just doesn't get asked often enough, does it? Well, it doesn't get asked often enough of me; but then again I'm not a musician, actor or artist and I don't get many interview requests from teen mags and lazy journalism students. So in the interest of actually having to think about it, I did, and this is what I came up with: Coffee. Bread. Decent music.

Surprise! Suburban utopia The Stranded Store provides all three! When you're lost in the wilderness 7km south of the CBD you can easily get your De Groot coffee fix, pick up a loaf of delicious artisan bread and be treated to all your (ok, my) favourite cafe songs. You can quit saving your bottles to send messages in and just settle into the window seats with Facebook chat, or perch on top of a steel bar stool while you yell 'ahoy!' to passing cyclists. You can even buy your milk, eggs, olives (bread and coffee) from here, as Stranded isn't afraid to share its ingredients, all sourced from top notch suppliers.

A lazy afternoon at Stranded will have you feeling far less at sea.

What is Happiness? Where is Love? Why did my high school class vote me most likely to die alone, simultaneously choking on a rat skeleton and being gnawed at by possums? How do I fix my broken phone (because throwing it into a pot of boiling water and yelling “Fire cannot kill a dragon!” certainly isn’t working)? Can I smell your hair?

I’m certain that at one stage or another all of us have posed such questions to others or ourselves. We have sought answers in such places as a kiddie pool at 4am after a bottle of scotch and a wheel of brie, and have been left unfulfilled.

Search no further, my friends! Here be wisdom! The University of Adelaide Philosophy Club meets every Wednesday to address all your existential, ethical, political, social and neurological dilemmas, with orations by many of the pre-eminent thinkers this state has to offer. And the best thing about Philosophy Club (other than the super cheap wine and cheese) is that, unlike many of the other hip clubs for kids such as Alcoholics Anonymous or the British National Party, this one is open to everyone!

Check out their Facey page to find out more information on how you can have centuries of knowledge, agonised over for thousands of years by brilliant minds, crammed into your head over a glass of cheap red. You need never wander aimlessly and alone through this hell we call existence again. Bitchin'!

Loopy and layered, ethereal and ghostly, Brooklynite Julianna Barwick brings her angelic, butter-wouldn't-melt voice to town this week. Filed somewhere between School of Seven Bells, Sigur Ros and the Australian Girls Choir, Barwick sure knows how to work the twiddly bits on her pedals, creating a captivating one woman choir with epic builds and goosebump moments. If she's good enough for Sufjan Stevens and co (her latest album The Magic Place was released on his label Asthmatic Kitty), then she's good enough for us!

What do you get when you cram 50 people into a tiny, low-roofed basement space, ply them with alcohol and then have Doe play for them? We're not sure, but we're definitely about to find out. Possible answers include: riots, transcendental experiences, cases of heatstroke, sonic bliss, getting drinks spilt on your new shoes, musical perfection, long queues, super-fun-dancing-times, losing your spot/mind when you pop upstairs for air, all of the above. Doe are on at midnight, but we'd recommend getting in way, way earlier.

Queen Of Family, Lara Torr, brings together a tight collection of artists to explore mums, dads and everything in between. It sounds a bit sentimental but in that annoyingly endearing way, similar to the way your mum always asks whether you'd prefer to watch Ellen or Dr Phil when you're actually not interested in either, you're just in the lounge room because the wifi signal is strongest there. Or the way your dad always turns his nose up when you tell him 'I'm out of normal, plain, regular ol' black tea - how about something a bit different, like (gasp) Earl Grey?' Ryan Sims, Chloe Langford, Lachlan Tetlow-Stuart, Rose Paton, Stan Mahoney and Stan's mum, Annette, present works of love and life in this exhibition. Love 'em or hate 'em, we've all got 'em, those parents. Why not bring 'em?

Eatin' off some melamine on my mezzanine. Doo-de-doo. Smothering my crumpets in that margarine. Any of you dis' my melamine I put yo' head on the guillotine. Boyfriend be taking me on picnics where we use our melamine. Cooking up home-made burgers using pressurised kerosene. An illustration of a burger! An owl with two heads! A monster! They're Douglas & Hope melamine plates with work from Australian artists including Dawn Tan, Dylan Martorell, Ghostpatrol, Miso and Miranda Skoczek on them.

These artists plates will enhance your crockery credibility at dinner parties, won't break when you drop them, and will contribute a large sum to your retirement fund when you get them evaluated on Antiques Roadshow in 2043. Forget your Australian Super Fund, these plates are a real investment in your future. Buy one over at Douglas & Hope's new online store or try your luck here, because we have a Dylan Martorell Tan 'two-headed bird' plate to give away. (To enter, just answer the following question.)