DJ Robot Citizen: Alternative Music Clubs Events & Radio Canberra Australia

31/01/2025

the author of the "Gothic Rock Black Book" Mick Mercer pours aptly gothly scorn ;) upon the top 200 list made by Uncut magazine ...

It’s massively disappointing, what did you expect? An unforgivably lazy approach (all interviews are ancient reprints apart from a wonderful piece on Juliane Regan and Tim Bricheno, of which more later) and the most important UK originals UK Decay, around whom the early scene virtually coalesced, don’t even have their wonderful “For Madmen Only” included! Christian Death’s ‘Only Theater Of Pain’, which most people would expect to see somewhere in any Goth top 10, are at 94. That sort of thing.

It’s perfectly understandable that they include the ‘goth-adjacent’ artists, because they want to sell copies, hence good old Uncle Bob on the cover, so you know there’ll be The Cure galore (all of the holy trinity make it). Also there’s bound to be the justifiable inclusion of both the Banshees and Joy Division, bands successful in their own right before the Goth scene came into being, and therefore a strong influence on the scene yet never part OF it. There’s plenty of Nick Cave, through the ages, yet still not part of the actual scene itself. We’ll see the Sisters, Mission, The Cult, All About Eve and Nephilim, albeit not greatly.

Elsewhere it's nice to see S*x Gang, The Danse Society (‘Heaven Is Waiting’, while ‘Seduction’ is ignored), Skeletal Family, Xmal (‘Tocsin’, but no ‘Fetisch’?), Alien S*x Fiend, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, March Violets, London After Midnight, Inca Babies, Black Tape For A Blue Girl, The Wake, Rosetta Stones, The Rose Of Avalanche, Virgin Prunes, even KaS Product, all of which is fine BUT …

Where are Children On Stun, Balaam, Ataraxia, Mephisto Walz, Ausgang, Nosferatu, Play Dead, IKON, Incubus Succubus, or modern wonders like A Cloud Of Ravens, Senex IV, Vazum or Ariel Maniki & The Black Halos? I ask because they prefer to include goth-adjacent over Goth. They’ve allowed album entries (sometimes more than one album) by Kirlian Camera, Sort Sol, Fra Lippo Lippi, Hunting Lodge, Front 242, The Stranglers (???), Samhain, Mogwai, Berlin (!), The Associates, Nitzer Ebb, In The Nursery, Tubeway Army and Matt Johnson. They even have s**t like Death In June, Current 93 and Marilyn Manson. That is wasted space.

To show how lopsided it all gets we hit the top 20, only to find Joy Division (twice), The Birthday Party, The Cure (twice), Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Bauhaus, Ministry, Swans, Iggy (‘The Idiot’), The Doors, PJ Harvey, The Sisters (twice), Nico, The Velvets, The Jesus And Marychain, and Depeche Mode. In other words over half of THE most important Goth albums of all time aren’t even Goth.

Would it be asking too much to simply shunt most of those into the second half of the chart and concentrate on what was actually Goth? And if you can waste space on some of these why on Earth would you not, as music journalists, have sufficient sense to include John Foxx-era Ultravox, and Gloria Mundi? Why does everything have to be so fu***ng pedestrian and ill-informed? How can you look at the assembled list when completed and argue that Nico genuinely deserves having three albums included while The Mission get just one? And so on and on and on….

Anyway, the features might entertain even though they’re mainly old reprints involving Dave Vanian, Bauhaus, Nick Cave, the Banshees, Cocteaus, The Sisters and The Cure. Obviously they couldn’t be bothered including anything with Ian Astbury, The Mission or the Neffs. The best thing here is the interview with Julianne Regan and Tim Bricheno, weirdly uncredited to any writer as far as I could see. It covers the whole Eves history with typical honesty from our delightful duo, and it does so with vitality and dignity, also getting at what Goth is, which none of the other pieces do. The magazine is worth getting for this interview alone.

I feel like a teacher marking homework. This gets five out of ten, or C+, at best. Detention beckons.

https://shop.kelsey.co.uk/product/ultimate-record-collection-200-greatest-goth-albums

https://www.yourcelebritymagazines.com/products/ultimate-record-collection-200-greatest-goth-albums-the-cure-robert-smith

26/01/2025

Event page = https://www.facebook.com/events/991978416293476 ... "Back by Popular Demand" - well several people've asked for more VAMP nights

09/01/2025

Tonight's the night! "Happy Hour" is 8-9pm with 30% discount on all drinks. Happening at Shadows Night Club - Canberra The event page = https://www.facebook.com/events/596804439598379/

08/01/2025

Nine years ago today, on his 69th birthday, David Bowie released his final album, “Blackstar”. It was his twenty-fifth studio album and his parting gift to this world. Bowie left us just two days later. To celebrate, dance and croon to his music this Friday the 10th, come along if you can to Vamp's DAVID BOWIE Club Night "9 Years" Free Entry :)

05/01/2025

A poster for this Friday's event ... It's FREE entry. We start ~8pm and we can go past midnight if there are enough happy punters around that time 🙂 Though if it's "quiet" we may close earlier. So aim to come early!

30/12/2024

I'm thrilled to announce I'll DJ after the MetalCore bands this Friday night at Transit Bar ... See links below for their tunes :) ... I'll mix a range of metal emo punk rock tunes :) FB event page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2907005792796313

The Bands

1] Alienist
https://www.facebook.com/AlienistAUS
and
https://www.instagram.com/alienistaus/

Tracks on youtube:

"Alienist - Prisoner Of You"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTUwHTk9Q78

"Hypnotise"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORIyeqgtyhI

"Distorted Reflections"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENLw8RU4Ufc

More at
https://www.youtube.com//search?query=alienist
and
https://www.youtube.com//videos

2] St Sinner at st.sinner
https://www.facebook.com/st.snnr
and
https://www.instagram.com/st.sinner.vevo/

Youtube:

"Headcase"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXs_vl4KC2I

"Villain"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_UEnDRsko8

"Devil Boy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2OzxVlgFkw

3] The Great White Dogs at
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61570179586897
and
https://www.instagram.com/greatwhitedogs/

~ ~ ~

tags:

30/12/2024

Hi Y'All, the Jan 4 date has changed theme from "Alt Music" to be a "Summernats After Party". Event notes: "DEMOLITION DERBY" Saturday Jan 4 2025 @ The Transit Bar. I'm DJing from 9pm, a mix of Rock Pop Party Anthems. Consider it like one of my old-time RETRO nights. It's Free Entry! :)

Venue on FB: Transit Bar
Location: Downstairs @ Baileys Corner, 143 London Circuit, CIVIC

Be mindful the Civic area will likely have lots of people from the "Summernats" weekend at Exhibition Park. And that's who this event is targeted at; at the venue's request.

For the more alternative music scene, I've got the "VAMP Bowie night" coming up on Friday January 10 at Shadows nightclub. And fingers-crossed, some more events to come in later January and February!

Tagz:

24/12/2024

spelling out what most of us probably already know ... Spotify is a massive scam .. From one of the comments: "When Spotify finally gets exposed, because they will, we will look back at the saddest mass destruction of musician/artist careers in human history. So many good bands and artists quit because they realized IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to play this streaming game when the system is like this. And when the house ALWAYS WINS, you are just stupid to continue playing. Now I have to give Spotify that they played smart. Keeping this scheme hidden for so long, and fooling the consumers to the point where they have a monopoly ... I'm ashamed to be a Swede.
I'm a musician myself and I’m lucky enough I can produce/mix/master enough stuff to make a good living but every day I think about my poor clients who are so extremely talented and hopeful.
For them, unsigned, unknown bands, its completely impossible for them to ”make it”. I cry for the young ones especially. I had the fortune to release a few records on CD and Vinyl so I could tour and actually become ”a real band” but yeah. This is beyond f*ckef up. I really truly hope that the Swedish gov will put an end to this soon and apologize to the whole world. Not only did we bring you Ikea. We also killed music."

👉🏼2nd channel - https://youtube.com/weaverbeats2lol👉🏼instagram - https://instagram.com/weaverbeats👉🏼discord - https://discord.com/invite/KEB2TG6👉🏼pa...

23/12/2024

I suppose I should post this ... A week ago an American friend motivated me to finally upload some of the earliest music I made, that I never got around to doing much with promo-wise. This track "To the Past/Future ... Thought Crime ... From the Age of the Thought Police" is from 1991 and was the first of the original pieces I composed and recorded [after some cover versions] to reach the stage of being considered "finished". https://soundcloud.com/eye-music-band-songs/to-the-past-to-the-future-from-the-age-of-the-thought-police-1991

More of the blah-blah ;) on that page ... "The earliest EYE tracks were dark experimental industrial-ambient soundscapes like this one. They were created during 1991-1992; recorded and mixed at a home in Canberra Australia; on the limited equipment available - a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder, a Korg synthesizer workstation, a guitar, a microphone, some Boss FX pedals, some household objects as percussion, and a tape machine to play the movie-dialogue "samples" plus some voices recorded off the radio ...

These tracks were made before having a computer with MIDI programming software. So it's nearly all performed and recorded "live" along with a few short sequence patterns from the synth. In hindsight I like the looseness of the human performance moreso than the rigid quantisation of MIDI programming.

This track is greatly inspired by and directly references George Orwell's "1984" - the movie version with John Hurt starring as Winston Smith - as is the associated heavier track "Confessions [Room 101]".

As is evident throughout my music-making I was very interested in the horrors of "totalitarianism" from a young age. That was probably from being forced to go to an awfully totalitarian religious school where the apparent adults in charge were paid by the gullible parents to abuse and torment their children. I endured 7 years of that. And it was only 2 years prior that I escaped that school when I made this track.

I was also affected through being an "androgynous" feminine person in a society that was totalitarian then about gender stereotypes and which was also in a hysteria of hostility towards anyone and anything potentially "gay"; the general society using the context of the AIDS crisis from the mid-late 80s as an excuse to bully, torment and bash people who strayed from the binary blah.

And underpinning all that I was born with "the wrong colours" for sun-worshipping Australian society. My skin was "too white", my "tan" was too pokadotty, my hair was too bright and "loud". Growing up, I was regularly reminded, multiple times each day on most days, that I was "a freak of nature" and that according to most who verbalised about it that made me ugly and hideous and someone who deserved to be bullied and harassed; while according to some, a minority of people, it made me "beautiful" and for some an object to seemingly fetishise. However some [including older family members] also commented things like "it would have been so much better for you and everyone if you were born a girl". In all, the intense focus from others upon my appearance, the being regularly reminded that I was starkly different to nearly everyone else, of feeling like the odd one out, it created a lifelong struggle with feeling alienated; with body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, anxiety and depression.

So, as with most artists, creating something about it, music like this, it was my therapy. :)

This is an original mix from early 1992, mixed to cassette-tape. Among EYE's goals for 2025 is to extract the audio from the 4-track tapes and attempt to make these early tracks sound a bit better on a computer. When that's done tracks such as this will be released on BandCamp among several albums.

These early pieces were inspired in particular by early industrial groups such as Einsturzende Neubauten, early-80s Laibach [eg "Rekapitulacija" album], Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle [eg. "Mission of Dead Souls" album], T.A.G.C., Cabaret Voltaire, early SPK and the extended experimental structures of late-60s and early-70s prog rock pieces by groups such as Pink Floyd and early Tangerine Dream.

These early tracks were released in Canberra on a small run of cassette-tapes in 1992; some were released on cassette-tapes in the mid-late 1990s in the UK via the 'Music & Elsewhere' label; and some were included on custom-burnt CDRs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, via the mail order service of the "Blatant Propaganda" record label ... link in comments

with best wishes,

DJ Robot Citizen
who somehow made it from the past, to the future, of December 2024! :)

This track "To the Past/Future ... Thought Crime ... From the Age of the Thought Police ... Greetings!" was the first of the original pieces EYE composed and recorded [after some cover versions] to re

17/12/2024

DJing this Saturnight December 21 2025 for "When The Music's ... The Doors & More!" -----> As the scheduled tribute band 'Unlocking The Doors' has postponed, I Robot Citizen will present a mix of psychedelic rock music by The Doors and other groups+artists from the mid-60s onwards ... I aim to add a list in subsequent posts, I'm sure you can guess most or all of them.

Think of it as a Psychedelic Rock Club Night ... with FREE Entry! :)

I aim to start DJing 8pm and intend to have related visual projections on the walls.

Happening at SHADOWS nightclub ... East Row Civic ... upstairs where 'Sideways' was, pretty much above where the legendary Phoenix pub was.
Link: Shadows Night Club - Canberra

Tagz:

16/12/2024

15/12/2024

Aiming to make the event page in coming days ... Friday Jan 10 2025 from 8pm, we have a one-off VAMP with a BOWIE theme night. It'll be 9 years since his passing. So there'll be scores of Bowie songs mixed with tracks by artists he worked with, his major contemporaries, and those who he clearly inspired, across the 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s & 10s

Venue: Shadows Night Club - Canberra ... it's on East Row, the Sydney Bldg in Civic. It's upstairs where "Sideways" was, almost above where the beloved Phoenix pub was and next door to what was The Asylum [long agooo!]

DJs are myself and Shari Tiger with some potential others pending their holiday plans.

If there's a grand-enough turnout, I'll be motivated to do more VAMP club events! It's rare to find the right venue and I reckon Shadows is it! So if you've been yearning for such a thing, some VAMPY club nights, this is the opportunity "to vote with your feet"! :)

For memorabilia about our 2016 Bowie tribute nights see
https://www.australiangothicindustrialmusic.com/dj-robot-citizen/night-clubs-2016.html #20160123

And the flyer for the 2014 one
https://www.australiangothicindustrialmusic.com/dj-robot-citizen/images/DJ-Robot-Citizen-2014-09-26-VAMP-David-Bowie-Special-v2-850w-HiRes.jpg

10/12/2024

quite possibly the 2nd or 3rd best poster I ever made! ;)

08/12/2024

another relic that someone just up'd to the "Heaven" nightclub FB page. The star shows my night "NEXUS" and - here comes a lil list of gripes lol - where the dear manager of the venue, Sylvie, was promoting "DJ Robbie" even though I'd been using "J Citizen" for several years in my own promos! Sigh!
"Electro" referred to Electronica, Electro-Industrial and EBM but Sylvie really didn't like "Industrial" and similar heavy music so opted for "electro".
Add to that I'm pretty sure Lisa wasn't a DJ on 2XX [tho' maybe she did some and I forget!] whereas I had been doing shows on radio 2XX for years. Sylvie did place a 2XX after my name in other promos, which was Ace! I donated a huge chunk of my life back then to that radio station.
Add to that - lol, more griping - Sylvie was leading with "Gothic" as the descriptor whereas I was marketing NEXUS as "indie electronica" being the main focus on my posters, in order to attract a larger crowd. Because the goth scene had "died off", as a wave of people had moved out of Canberra '98-99.
Add to that a newer club night called NARCISSUS had been going for a while by then as a night specifically for goth+industrial. I recall I was also DJing at that still in mid-1999; retired after a year or so of it due to being too busy, plus it wasn't much fun to be at then due to a few "personalities" ... I retired NEXUS in mid-2000 because I had a new job which required a working brain and so I couldn't be up all night on the Thursdays anymore.

Anyhowz, even with those indulgent gripes, it is grand to see this after 25 years; good to have some more memorabilia with a related title on it, as there's so little that was kept from those times. For a loong time I had nothing much [like flyers of events] and I felt awkward saying "yeah I did stuff" and not having proof, as, over the years, I've met quite a few who claim they've done stuff and I trusted their word but turns out that they hadn't!

Around that time I rarely was somewhere that had copies of BMA so I wasn't aware of these promos. "BMA" is the Canberra music scene magazine. :)