reading matters #3

a veritable bonanza!

Woebot interviews Dave Noddz the designer for Suburban Base
and gets him to design the Woebot T-shirt which looks sensational
(hold tight though for the the blissblog monogrammed hankies and Y-fronts [this-blogger-backdrop green naturally])
(sorry to hear Woebot hibernating for the next few months)

thematically-linked cluster:
Paul Autonomic on Kode 9 and Spaceape album
K-punk on On U and Sherwood/Stewart
Martin Clark’s Pitchfork run-through of the season's grime/dubstep long-player eruption
(I must concur with his underwhelmed response to the Skream album, it sounds kinda dinky and thin bordering on dub-muzak a lot of the time, and the jazzual track is a serious mis-step)

Kid Shirt gets us intrigued in Shit and Shine
(although the suspicion lingers that they're an imaginary band in that great fanzine tradition--which Monitor did with William Wilson, each taking turns to review them across successive issues, in the process producing a wildly non-congruent picture of "the band", climaxing in the making-the-figment-real gambit of the Wilson Sisters flexi in our final issue, a dubtracted "Rock'n'Roll, Part 2" Glitterbeat homage which Greil Marcus included in one of his Artforum Rock 'n'Roll Real Life columns, and which -I forgot to mention in the glamstravaganza a few months ago, was the Monitor crew--not me, I'd moved to Londonby then--inventing schaeffel way ahead of schedule, 1986)

Acid Nouveaux coins a useful concept, Slam,
(yeah this is another reason, a sonic reason, why rave and rap are rock-ist to the core -- it's a physical affinity as much as the obvious and real ideological/attitudinal similarities)

plenty to enjoy in Jarvis's OMM:
bill drummond's no music day
jeremy deller on depeche mode fans
russell senior on sheffield now
pierre henry's soundtrack of my life
(including this tres ghost box-y morsel: Henry collaborated with English proggers Spooky Tooth on the 1969 rock mass Ceremony cos he was "interested in the idea of pop as a pagan ritual")
me on infantjoy
(i gave it four, actually)
roundtable on music today

the missus-edited annual Best of New York issue of the voice

evil republican bloggers tarnish my name (sort of)

Joe Gross with another article on compression in music
(i tell you where i've really noticed it something heinous--kids TV. I come in the living room and the blare of it hurts your ears, tell kieran "tun it down, it's too flippin' LOUD" and he does, but it makes no difference--cos the pain comes from the lack of internal fluctuations in the volume range. Used to be that the commercials were painfully louder than the programmes cos of the compression, but now lots of the children's programmes, esp. the superhero types ones, are insanely compressed. With that and the hyper-fast editing, it makes me think of how children's programmes in my day used to be tranquil and slow-moving and drew you into their still enchantment; nowadays it's like most of them have the cultural equivalent of corn syrup crammed into them).

John Carney aka Kevin Pearce on Pram vocalist Rosie Cuckston , part of his fascinating one-instalment a-week year-long iconographical project at Tangents
(he's spot on in identifying the Ghost Box connection-- in fact if I recall right Julian House actually lived for a while in Birmingham during the '90s and was right in the thick of that Broadcast/Pram milieu... Pram untimely in another sense by being the very first band i can think of to evoke/invoke postpunk, specifically the Odyshape/Colossal Youth end of things... this was back in 1993! )