Amy Winehouse’s trial date for a drug possession charge in Norway was postponed this week until further notice.

Super cool Blake Fielder-Civil (Winehouse’s husband who is also involved in the case) can’t make the trip since he’s currently sitting in a jail cell in Britain on assault and bribery related charges.

Anne Vedvik of the Bergen courthouse said Winehouse had been due to appear on Friday and “The hearing has therefore been postponed to an undetermined date.”

Winehouse was arrested at their hotel with her husband and her hairdresser in Norway last October after they were caught with marijuana in their possession. She was later released after paying a 500-euro fine. Interestingly enough, agreeing to pay a fine in Norway is the equivalent of admitting to the charges. This also makes it somewhat difficult
to obtain visas in the future - which is probably why she ran into trouble for the Grammy’s last week.

We here at Synthesis really hope she pulls herself together

Listening to Dengue Fever for my last post got me on the whole Rock Music via The Far East. A while back, while YouTubing Myself I stumbled upon perhaps the greatest rock band of the late ’50s: the Tielman Brothers.

I could go on for a few graphs about how they grew up in Indonesia, their father was a captain and later quartermaster in the KNIL (Royal Dutch Indonesian Army) and, after being in a Japanese concentration camp and raising his family, encouraged his children to play music. They toured Indonesia, then got huge in the Netherlands, yadda yadda. Fuckit, just check out the clip and dig in:

rock!

The other morning I was lucky enough to catch Terry Gross interviewing Zac and Ethan Holzman from Dengue Fever on her nationally syndicated interview show, Fresh Air. For those unfamiliar, the band is reviving Cambodian Pop, a style of music that became all but extinct during the time of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
Originally created during the Vietnam conflict, Cambodian Pop was the result of locals listening to American Armed Forces radio, grooving on the psychedelic San Francisco / post-British Invasion sound and mixing it with their native language and instruments. Then shortly after, Pol Pot and his cronies took power and murdered most of Cambodia’s intellectuals and artists, rendering the fledgling musical style all but destroyed. Nearly 30 years later, in comes Dengue Fever, a group of Americans plus a Cambodian singer, who proceed to re-record classic Cambodian Pop songs, as well as their own originals in the style. And it’s super ill.

I interviewed Dengue Fever’s bassist Senon Williams and singer Chhom Nimo (the latter at the time spoke very limited engrish) as the 2nd Annual Ioda SXSW Party in 2006. It’s great to see the band picking up steam and turning a new generation onto rad psychedelic rock. Their new album, Venus On Earth, is available now.

Godcore luminaries, and one of my personal favorite bands, Underoath announced yesterday that they are currently finishing up the writing for the follow up to 2006’s Define the Great Line, and are planning on entering the studio next month to begin tracking:

So we’re less than a month away from going into the studio! It feels just like it was yesterday when we recorded Define the Great Line. I’m having a lot of fun writing this record. It’s one of our heaviest things we’ve ever done, and at the same time really experimental. A few months ago I felt like this record would be the least we’ve changed in a while. It seemed that for the first time we were going into a record we hadn’t been dissatisfied with our previous effort, and therein had no predisposition toward alienating ourselves from it. I look back at Define the Great Line and wouldn’t change a thing artistically, and although I feel a sense of achievement to have finally made a piece of art that I wouldn’t have changed years later, it also opens up new pressures of matching or exceeding what has already been done. I think our new record is going to be less of a attempt to disassociate the 24 year old men we are now from the 22 year old men we once were, but rather embracing what creativity we have and expanding on it with new influences and new experiences. I’m super pumped to see Matt’s new studio, and to work with Adam and Matt again. It will be a really fun experience.

Adam and Matt are of course producers, Adam D and Matt Goldman, the production team from Define the Great Line and a big reason why that record has scanned upwards of 500,000 copies since its release. Someone at Wikipedia is claiming the new record will be titled “I Am the Culprit” but that shit is highly doubtful since Wikipedia is made mostly of FAIL. Read an interview I did with Underoath frontman Spencer Chamberlain in the music archives and see for yourself just how hard I jock this band. Seriously.

Photo by Jeff Shaner, 1337 shooping by Daniel Taylor

We here at the award-winning Synthesis Blog recently reached a milestone in our adventures in in blogosphere. Last week I beamed with pride as our blog hit its 500th page. In the tomes therein lie amazing pieces of journalism that we’ve linked to, awesome YouTube clips, memes, and Synthesis blog personalities proclaiming a litany of gross and otherwise widely inappropriate things. I decided, in celebration to see just what we were writing about back in July of aught 5.

7/7/05: In a display of the kind of forward-thinking to come, our first post was not merely the word “Test,” but the iconic image above. I like to imagine this guy still working at Pete’s coffee, listening to Crass songs on his iPod, thinking about and hating that his most punk rock moment sadly occurred at the Warped Tour… Then I rub my wiener. (A picture is worth 1,000 words, but a mental picture is priceless.)

Since no one save your news junkie uncle wants to read an 1,000-word-long blog post, we found it’s easier just to post pictures of punk-lite rockers and YouTube clips. SECRET OF SUCCESS!!! So here’s to us giving ourselves a pat on the back, and to another 500 pages of stoking out the Google Index.

Our hommie Allen Chen over at The Austinist just shot me an email to clue me in about the launch of the SXSWist microsite which will be stacked with all of your forthcoming SXSW needs and questions regarding your upcoming Austin experience. Austin - for the record - is our favorite city (next to Chico - which isn’t really a city I guess - more a pre-city) and we’re looking forward to consuming a massive amount of Lone Stars while stacking massive amounts of content for you to enjoy.

Let’s just hope Texas votes Obama next Tuesday.