Is Fat Roland my real father? Norwegian woof. *click*

I thought I would like February more than I liked January. However, if January was a rat-infested tin house in a forest full of dead baboons, then February is the lice-ridden mulch underneath the festering welcome mat of the rat-infested tin house in the forest full of dead baboons.

And so, to lift me a few measly iota above this interminable funk I seem to be in (I can't even get excited about Cool Runnings being on iPlayer), I thought I'd do a quick update on my whereabouts.

Firstly, you can hear me read one of my short stories if you're in Manchester tomorrow night. If you heard me read at Waterstone's rather eccentric open mic night at the end of last year, you'd have heard tomorrow's story before. Otherwise, come listen to my fairy story at the Bad Language open mic night, at the Castle Hotel on Oldham Street. There will be many other writers, so I only have four minutes in which to impress you.

Secondly, my presenting partner Lee and I will reunite in a public performance for the first time since the well-documented Refresh FM debacle. We'll be running the next Special Guessed pub quiz at the somewhat super King's Arms pub in Salford on March 1st (8.30pm). I'd love it if we got a decent crowd to this: it would certainly mean a lot to me. We'll fill your pants with so much trivia, you'll be shaking it out of your trouser ends like the UNCLE guy in the Great Escape.

And finally, there's always my F1 Losers League, which I have banged on about before, but which now has an extended entry deadline of March 26th. Visit the website for more.

Yes, this blog is meant to be about electronic music. Pfffrt. If you want consistency of content, go and read The Pigeon Post.  I have been a bit shoddy recently, but there'll be more music witterings soon, honest. Meanwhile, here is a list of search terms that haven't resulted in recent hits on my blog:

- junglist Richard Madeley
- Norwegian wool
- a cacophony of roses
- the holy trinity of Rudy's Rare Records, Cool Runnings and Rastamouse
- Justin Biepbipe
- is Fat Roland my real father
- turnpike Birmingham rocking chair crew
- Norwegian woof
- cheap supermarket toothpaste
- Venetian Snarls

I am downloading the James Blake album

I am downloading the James Blake album.

Digital kilobytes of James Blake are swooshing into my memory like recalled jokes or déjà vu.

James Blake is now sitting inside my machine, next to my Yorkshire holiday photos, discarded Ableton sessions and my Justin Biebpipe love poetry.

Listening to this album will be like a thousand swan feathers brushing my cheek in the breeze from the breath of a million angels.

Pressing play on track one will be like the tentative moment before a teenage kiss, that giddy feeling of nascent love-- oh hold on, the computer's crashed. Let me just press restart.

Sorry about this. It takes a while to reboot. Full of viruses, this thing.

So then. Done anything interesting recently? Oh, here we go. Let me just find the mp3s again.

Oh great, it's lost them. Thanks, computer, you galoofing mess of catastrophic circuitry. You've ruined everything.

I don't want to listen to the James Blake album now. That would be like listening to the wails of whales speared in a bloody sea. Like the last sighs of a cherubim skewered on a cackling devil's pitchfork.

Cocksocks.

Kilobytes of James Blake lie dead in my computer, exhausted sonic sperm on the sidelines of my digital tubes.

Mr and Mrs Spotify plug my oozing holes

I usually cough up a monthly Oozy Bleeps playlist around about now, but January is to decent electronic music what a trip to Disneyworld is to Charlie Brooker.

And the meagre crumbs that were released in January appear not to be on Spotify. At least, not the ones I want. As Glasgow collective Lucky Me tweeted a few days ago, "Spotify will never pay folks like us because they refuse editorial: they are only sales responsive."

It's a strange animal, Spotify. The Cynical Musician is right when he asks if Spotify is not a money maker, what is it good for.

Putting revenue aside (I'll let proper musicians discuss that), as a music lover, it's about as useful as a chocolate tea cosy. My recent plays on Spotify include Resoe, SBTRKT and Flying Lotus. What is the front page recommending to me at the moment? Bonnie Tyler, Mozart and Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.

It's almost as if Mr and Mrs Spotify in their little green Spotify cottage with their little green Spotify umbrellas took a look at Amazon's cookie-monster recommendations system and thought, "no, that won't do, that won't do at all. What we want is the equivalent of walking into Starbucks to buy a coffee and being sold wellington boots instead."

Spotify is good for playlist recommendation, hence my oozing and my bleeping, but when whole record labels are missing from the service because Spotify can't put food on their table - can't even give them a table - then what's the point?

Anyway, the Oozy Bleeps will bleep again next month. I will soldier on with Spotify because, I hope, some of you find it useful. The playlist is still up there, and it will be updated throughout the month.

F1 apocalypse (or 'fantasy league', depending on which term you prefer)

So far this February, this blog has been like London at the start of 28 Days Later. Abandoned buildings. Unread newspapers. Car alarms punturing the silence of desertion.

But screw all that: I've been busy reviving an old project which long-time readers of this blog will recognise.

The F1 Losers League is my attempt at a fantasy formula one competition, with the crucial difference that you need to create the worst possible team. So you get points if your cars are slow, unreliable or crashy.

I wanted to come up with some F1 / electronica puns so I could shoe horn (car horn?) the league into this blog without making it look like an obvious (spark)plug. But all I've come up with so far is Apex Twin, James Brake and Bargeboards of Canada.

The F1 Losers League works like this: you make up a team of four drivers and two constructors. Based on bad performance on and off the track, they earn you points in races and sometimes inbetween races. Everyone pays a fiver and up to seven teams will win cashmoney.

I've run this league on-and-off since 2004, so I know those who get the most out of it tend to have at least a passing interest in formula one. It also helps if you have an inner geek because there are ways of manipulating your team throughout the season.

Have a look at the league on the F1 Losers website. You need to enter before the zombies come and tear out your heart, or until the second week of March (whichever comes sooner).

FLYING LOTUS! The most obvious pun ever! Why didn't I think of that? I always think of good things way too late.

Edit: see the comments section below for two more doozies: Saubers of Paradise and Susumu Toyota. Feel free to add your own!

Blood sugar synths felines: some almost-recent tracks worth your attention

The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Didn't expect that, did you? Red Hot Chili Peppers. There, I said it again.

No, I'm not talking about the tongue-busting offspring of plants from the genus Capsicum, members of the nightshade family, Solanasomething-or-other. I'm talking about the wiley shirtless guitar plodders who appear to have gone afro pop.

Actually, I'm taking about John Frusciante, who dumped the Chilis in 2007 but has now turned up as one part of Speed Dealer Moms with legendary bass-driller Venetian Snares. This is a live experimental project consisting of those boys, Chris McDonald, a bunch of drum machines (gear, pictured) and, in the band's words, "many cats".

Their first release is the Speed Dealer Moms EP, a short and bitter chunk of tapping distracto-grooves recorded as-live in 2010 that will frighten Chili poppers but may sound somewhat familiar to Snares followers.

While I'm perusing recent tracks (mainly from the end of last year), I've been addicted to Rafferties's Rank Functions EP. The title track is a 2step tech stormer on his own Super label that turned my pants brown, but check those warm chords in His Counting House or the out-and-out house snap of Horse Flesh. Suddenly, I feel Raffertie has "arrived" in that really pretentious way some people say "arrived".

Meanwhile, The Black Dog's latest offering is Subject To Delays. That's not an announcement for tardiness, but rather the name of their latest EP in their Music For Real Airports project which features rolling house and drifting ambience in equal measure.

Picture: modified from a Universo Frusciante snap.

Guest post: Crimes against crimes against keyboards

I asked you for your nominations for the worst crimes committed against dance music, from which I picked a random winner. Jon Mann gets a bunch of mp3s and this guest post on Fat Roland On Electronica...

I would like to nominate The Black Eyed Peas –….I don’t actually know the name of the track although I should probably find out what it’s called before I start. You probably know the one I’m on about already, something about a good day. It’s probably called ‘a good day’.

It’s called ‘I got a feeling’ and it’s good night not day.

O.K so I can’t say that I’ve ever sat down to listen to it but I don’t need to, it was so popular when it was released that it became part of the wallpaper that belonged to time and place. That time and place, that thankfully is now behind us.

The production is actually not that offensive, it’s a poppy, upbeat, forgettable dance track. The most compelling evidence against it is in its lyrics. I might as well have not written anything here other than the lyrics.

Here is a sample which I will now cut and paste from somewhere on interwebs.

“go out and smash it
let go o' my guard
Jump off that sofa
Let’s get get up”

I’m suddenly impressed at just how throwaway and thoughtless these lyrics really are.

“I feel stressed out
I wanna let it go
Lets go way out spaced out
and losing all control”

That’s enough of that. To counteract any harmful side effects here are a few lines from Etchogon-S by Autechre

“…//.-*

/,.’];--

/’;[;[;

===*”

Better?

My point, if there is one, is that despite the song’s protagonist repeatedly claiming to have ‘the feeling’ the song itself is devoid of ‘the feeling’. Its only purpose is to fill a bit of space somewhere for a few minutes. Actually listening to this sort of stuff is a bit like going on a diet where you eat nothing but tile grout. 

Will.i.am is very keen on his band having the right image, I read an interview with him in the Metro and he said so himself. This, I imagine is what prompted him to stop making vaguely listenable hip hop and get a sexy female singer that can piss herself at will while on stage. [Citation needed]

Dance music, electronic music are famously places where the anonymous artist can thrive, knocking out bass odysseys from a sweaty bedsit in Hackney, only emerging at night for skins and cigs from the all night garage. This is where the real shit is at. I’m not against artists having big personalities at all but for everyone’s sake please try to keep the music real and please keep the drums raw.

I suppose ‘I got a feeling’ wasn’t really designed for me. You could say ‘but it’s ok for the feeble minded to shake their limbs at’. Well yes, but we all have to suffer though don’t we? Something really needs to be done about this.

Basically we just need to play more Aphex.

Everyone, now.

This guest post was written by Jon Mann.

Crimes Against Keyboards: the winner

Roll out the Bunty magazines and spank your carpets until they're dust-free. We have a winner, ladies and gentlemen.

Jon Mann has won the Crimes Against Keyboards competition. He bags himself Bleep.com's top 100 tracks of 2010, which probably means he'll need to build new shelves in his mp3 player to take all the extra weight.

Some fine people didn't win, including Compound Ear who used my logo and said really nice things about my blog and refers to his chosen dance music nemesis as an "aural holocaust". But I'm happy Jon won because I like his rant too. It will appear later today as guest post on Fat Roland On Electronica.

Jon, who describes himself as 29-years-old and an Aquarius (I'm *so* turning this blog into a dating site) says:

"Just really happy to be the lucky one who got selected for the prize. Just dropping it into itunes now :-)

"I've picked up a couple of these tracks over the course of the year but I'm really looking forward to hearing something good that passed me by in 2010."

Meanwhile, Bleep's top 100 is available on their site until February 10th. I know you can probably stream or steal a bunch of brilliant tunes from last year, but downloading this lot at 30 pence a track is a pretty impressive one-hit way of downloading the state of dance music today. Like Keanu downloading martial arts in Something's Gotta Give (editor's note: check this is the right film).

And no, I wasn't paid to say that. Long-time readers of this site know I'm a sucker MC for all things Warp-related.

Watch this space for Jon's winning entry and proof that people who, shock horror, don't have a blog can write blog posts too.

You have 23 hours left in which to win 100 mp3s

The deadline for my Crimes Against Keyboards mp3 competition is tomorrow (Monday) at noon. If you haven't entered already, here's what you need to do:

- Decide on dance music's worst moment. It could be an awful band, a novelty hit, an established artist getting it horribly wrong, or a wider trend towards crapdom.

- Write about it. Either blog it or email something to dj at fatroland.com. A couple of paragraphs will do, but longer rants are welcome too.

- One entrant will be randomly chosen as the winner. The prize will be bleep.com's top 100 tracks of 2010, worth thirty quid or thirty-five euros or fifty bucks. You'll get a voucher code which I have secretly snuggled in my nappy.

It really is that easy.

FAQs

Here is a frequently-asked question list for those not yet swayed to enter.

Q. What is an mp3?

A. It stands for music plop-plop-plop, which is the sound mp3s make when they load into the mini record players contained within white i-pod headphones.

Q. Is Justin Biebpipe in the list of 100 tracks included in the prize?

A. Technically no. Although you can re-create the Biebpipe magic by riding a skateboard as you listen. Why not fashion your hair into a bouffanted cowpat? And remember to brush your teeth for that winning Justin smile as you utter the words, "yeah, I'm the white-boy Usher, so what?"

Q. Can I listen to these songs on the train?

A. Many express services have special listening points, in which you plug your CD player into a bucket of cold sandwiches congealed with fake cheese, leaked Stella and the sweat - and other bodily fluids - of a thousand pimply buffet car assistants.

Q. What if I don't like the music?

A. I've done a survey of my teddy bears and 280% of them liked 104% of the tracks. 28% of them also would vote Conservative, but that's neither here nor there. I'm constantly barraged with people asking for recommendations of the latest hippety-grunge popstep disco classics. There's no better way to super-charge your ears with the high-fat cream of the current crop than getting your hairy mitts on Bleep's top 100. I'm a genuine fan of the site and that's why I'm doing this competition.

Q. Why can't think of any bad dance music?

A. You have no ears. And no brain. Just write. You may surprise yourself. And if you don't do this, the Venga Boys have won.