Forepaw

Recordings from the Kisses Bye Bye performance (plus a bonus "studio" recording) have been uploaded, constituting our very first series of podcasts. You can download and/or subscribe here.

Dimitra (from Archaic Forms), Festival of Gay Light Classical Music (feat Matt Gleason from the Stabs), and Daisy will start plugging things in and tripping over keyboards at 5.30pm on Saturday the 24th of June, finishing up God knows when. It'll cost you five bucks to get in the door, which'll help Forepaw pay the rent and keep the wolves at bay. Wolves!

For those who can't make it, the show will be broadcast live on Let Your Freak Flag Fly, 3CR 855am AND for residents of Ruckers Hill, broadcast in glorious FM stereo on the Forecast.

Last night we had our first crack at broadcasting with our previously mentioned kit from Broadcast Your Podcast. After inserting a 9 volt battery and plugging the unit into a computer playing a random selection of Forepaw-favourite mp3s, we found ourselves a nice little patch of unoccupied FM real estate at 99.8. We hooked the BYP kit's tiny antenna up to a larger antenna in an attempt to strengthen our signal, without really knowing if it would help at all. We grabbed a walkman, our battered melways and a hiliter and jumped on a bicycle to map our transmitting range. The Result? A good stretch of High St from the Town Hall, almost all the way down to Separation St, and about block out from High St both East and West.

We imagine if you were using a larger receiver - like in a car or your living room, you might be able to pick up the signal just outside of this area. If you're a Northcote local, try tuning in next time we broadcast and let us know how you go.

We've decided that Saturday afternoons, 2pm til 6pm, will be our initial, regular time of opening for shop-related activities. There's currently a small but eclectic selection of stuff on offer, some highlights being: objects and prints by Anji Berkvist, books, zines, stickers, badges and posters from Breakdown Press, Stickers by Marcsta, objects and drawing/collage pieces by Tai Snaith, Jewellery by Gregg Mann, various publications from Silent Army and a shitload of badges by weather records CEO/3CR personality Mike Smith...

Drop into 275 High St Northcote to say hello.

Oh, and also, if you're interested in selling something at Forepaw, find out more here, and drop us a line.

A little while ago, we found out about this project called Broadcast Your Podcast that's building and sending FM transmitters to folks who podcast, allowing them to broadcast on the airwaves to their local neighbourhood, as well as podcasting to people on the other side of the world. This idea rightly got us all excited, as local radio seemed a perfect addition to our activities as a whatever-we-are, so we wrote to Lotte at BYP, and got a reply the very next day telling us to expect our transmitter in the mail in a couple of weeks! Extraordinary! Anyway, this morning we found this at the front door:







Testing will occur this weekend - we'll let you know how it goes.

So, we've just had our first "test-run" weekend of activities, as part of the northern exposure arts festival. Friday night kicked kicked off with a video installation by Lachlan Conn called Hocus-Locus, which joined five or so other shopfronts up and down the street showing video work by Jonothan Chong, Joel Zika, Anto Skene, Cindy Lee and a handful of others. We left the installation to run on its own while we crawled the various gallery openings that were happening, bumped into lots of friends, checked out chainsaw-sculptor-dude out front of the church (the general consensus seemed to be Yes, he is carving a giant penis) and, later in the evening, drunkenly avoided trams.

Saturday night featured Andrew Harper's Bad Fairy storytelling show. Harper gave us a typically engaging performance and whispered, screeched, yowled and swore his way through stories variously found, poached, and experienced. If you bump into him at the pub buy him a beer and demand to hear the True Tale of the Shark's Head. Kisses Bye Bye followed, who are the coolest fucking band in the inner northern suburbs, dance moves notwithstanding. They rule and there's already talk of an encore performance happening here soon. We'll put some recordings up on the Forecast soon as we can get our hands on 'em.

Post-gig cleanup and pre-shop setup on the Sunday took longer than expected - the whole damn day in fact - so the shop didn't open as early as planned. At least now we know. We screened the Seditious Intent collection of films, currently being distributed by our friends at EngageMedia. To be frank though, the quality of the bulk of the films was kinda embarrassing, and we had a lot more fun afterwards watching videos of insane preachers found at Beware of the Blog.


At this point we're pretty happy with how the space functions in a number of guises, and we know what tweaking needs to be done to make things work better.

Forepaw gives thanks to: Harper, Kisses Bye Bye, Samuel Acres, Anna Helme @ EngageMedia, Tom + Lou @ Breakdown Press, Anji Berkvist, Kieren Mangan, Tai Snaith, Mike Smith, Gregg Mann and everyone who turned up or stopped to have a look.