For the first time I got a CD through the mail addressed to:

Simon Reynolds
Blissblog...

I was as startled and as weirdly pleased as the day in 1984 when out of the sheer blue a record arrived in the post box (me being the contact address for Monitor). My first freebie! (Well strictly speaking not "mine" and as the stuff started trickling in there was soon some squabbling over the currant buns let me tell you). It was Danielle Dax's Jesus Egg That Wept. (Which weirdly I listened to the other day on account of laboring over a ridiculously over-extensive--my own fault--discography). Not the most auspicious start, maybe, but the feeling of joy and anticipation when it comes to tearing open the day's arrivals has never quite left me. Cos you never know.

So in a way it's like coming full circle. Back to the (if can I say this) "purity" of doing a fanzine.

(Monitor started out with a strict policy of no reviews, no interviews, just thinkpieces and manifestos. All the stuff the music press had stopped doing by '84. That policy went out the window soon after the records started arriving. We instituted a review section pretty damn sharpish!)

Oh, the CD that arrived c/o Blissblog? Welcome to.... Brazzaville (Web of Mimicry). Your guess is as good as mine. But I shall dutifully listen to it in honour of its symbolic-ness.