Borne out of a desire to invigorate Sydney’s sedate CBD with some beautiful and engaging works of art, The Paper Mill is a new artist run space smack bang in the financial district, on Angel Place. I remember being dumbstruck by the majesty of Grizzly Bear this Sydney Festival, and looking next door to the rather nondescript Christian Book Store. Now I’m not sure if Jesus is all up on Twitter and the hard copy has gone the way of the music industry, but fast forward to today and four young artists with backgrounds ranging from art to graphic design and printmaking have taken over the space.

Credit to Clover Moore, as Sydney City Council is getting behind the project and helping to make the George Street precinct not just about Justin Hemmes making more money and pre-paid only bus rides. Not only are the youngsters curating some fine fine shows, they are also putting on artist talks, drawing classes, paper making and other workshops. Their first show — opening on September 7th — features some of Sydney’s brightest emerging artists, ranging from sculpture to drawing to video, but all with some sort of focus or engagement with paper.

Of course like most art endeavours in Australia, it is poorly funded and they are scraping by to set up the gallery, so they are putting on two fundraisers. When they asked my band The Paper Scissors to play, it was in the blink of an eye that we agreed, as we do like stationery and we are always willing to support people doing good things.

So Fundraiser 1 — let’s call it the Rock Fundraiser — is on at the Oxford Art Factory, tonight (Wednesday, August 25), and features The Paper Scissors, Bird Automatic, Eye to Eye, Lucy Hall, and Dara Gill. More details here.

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I came across Darwin Deez when I was doing my daily trawling for new videos, no doubt procrastinating. He and his band were on Vincent Moon’s amazing Blogotheque site doing a live-one shot video. It’s nowhere near as good as some of the better work on the site: the sound is patchy and the performance is fun but not very good. But it still fascinated me enough to click on the MySpace link and discover that Darwin Smith is a talented and enigmatic youngster. He is a great example of Gen Y’s I-can-do-anything-and-everything attitude, making choreographed dance pieces to Passion Pit and short films about the ins and outs of boy-friend relationships (male friends, not lovers) as well as finding time to make an EP and an album of lo-fi pop on a friends PC.

He is just about to release his debut album, which is full of shiny pop tunes that are denser than you’d think on first listen. His sound is like a mish-mash of the 80s and 90s, with dinky synths and 808 drums, all with his brittle Strat chords, and vocals that can oscillate from sweet falsetto to laissez faire attitude in a few breaths. There isn’t anything ground breaking about it, it’s just pop. But maybe that’s the charm of it. There is a familiarity and inventiveness that comes through and makes you love it. Check out the clip for Radar Detector — some people will hate it, it’s the epitome of indie-hipster, like an out-take from Juno mixed with Prince. It’s so sweet that if you hated it, you must be bitter and twisted.

It was a privilege being able to sit down and listen to TV On The Radio’s album Dear Science from start to finish. An added bonus was the fact that I’ve been in the America for a month — the album sums up the atmosphere I have witnessed in the US: tension, money, a bigger gap between rich and poor than I’ve ever seen, a never ending far away war, and some vague hints at political hope. From the inset, TV On The Radio get bad ass on you, combining their trademark layers of barber shop vocals with criss-crossing handclaps over doomsday synth pads and screaming guitars on Halfway Home, which is like a grown up cousin of Wolf Like Me from their 2006 LP Cookie Mountain, easing you into the fact that beyond this point they are going to erase everything you thought you knew about TVOTR. But you should have expected that anyway.

Surprises! Horns! (by New York afro beat crew Antibalas) and bubbling and skanking guitars surface their heads. It’s like they couldn’t keep their funk at bay any more, and it is a welcome surprise.

Crying, Golden Age and almost half of the album seem to hark to Prince, Bowie’s ‘Station to Station’ and even Peter Gabriel, with stuttering head nod beats and understated bass lines.

They have hit their stride lyrically and sonically, fading out their self-conscious wall of delayed guitars and noise, trading them in for rich strings, keeping the textures they have always had but using them to full effect.

Stork & Owl (respect for the ampersand) is a true tear jerker, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone weaving a strange fairy tale metaphor over a rolling crunk like beat with layers of plucked and bowed strings.

Producer and band member Dave Sitek has proven himself to be the genius we all thought he was, after the slight diversion of his production on Scarlett Johansson’s dissapointing ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ (but hey everyone’s gotta get paid).

He combines drum machines and programmed beats and synths with live instrumentation, layering without overcomplicating, adding gradually — particularly on the slower ballads: Love Dog reaching the similar ecstatic points of Bjorks Joga, with an outro of a filtered cascading beat playing across epic strings.

Maybe he has laid off the weed a little — ‘sitting in my underwear doing bong hits is how I get a mix to gel’ (from an interview with Remix magazine). Or maybe he hit it harder?

Every song has it’s won merit.

It cements the fact that TVOTR have made a focused, funky, emotional, complex album, a struggle between doom and hope, at once experimental and avant garde but also managing to be Pop.

I wish I was still here to see them at The Brooklyn Masonic Temple in October. But I have to wait until they come to Australia.

As head honcho of my band The Paper Scissors, I am in charge of many things both musical and menial, and then also the aesthetic and web aspects — artwork, blogs, and the whole identity of the band. Bands these days have to offer more than just a product, a CD, a clip and then a live show. There are people that have really embraced the change of the industry, not just the over talked MP3 killing the record industry debate, but the interactivity and dialogue that artists now have with their audience, through the web. One artist who I discovered recently and who epitomizes this is Lightspeed Champion, the solo project of Devonte Haynes, an English singer-songwriter. He plays very melodic pop with elaborate arrangements — Elton John meets Fleetwood Mac with a Jarvis Cocker-like vocal twang. Lightspeed Champion (named after a comic he drew as a kid) is a far jump from his previous job as guitarist with cult London screamos Testicicles. I think a lot of his appeal can be attributed to his aesthetic. He has impressive press shots with his ever present thick rimmed glasses, random animals, ten minute videos, and a blog where he writes and uploads photos and videos every day. There is a thick tapestry that shapes a cult of personality around him. He talks candidly about his friends and his life on his blog; taking in celebrities (doing songs with Klaxons, Patrick Wolf, playing Strokes songs with The Arctic Monkeys), parties, the DVDs that he’s watching, and so on. From the outside, it seems that he is a super connected, prolific, slightly narcissistic, yet brilliant artist who is fully embracing the web and shaping the aesthetic of his music. All of this with only one single lifted so far from his debut album.

Listen to the Lightspeed Champion song, Waiting Game.