UK events - Glasgow June 22, London June 24, Bristol June 27

GLASGOW - Saturday, June 22 - Tomorrow Never Knows: 'The Future' Symposium -  at Centre For Contemporary Arts - 10 AM to 5 PM

I'm giving the keynote speech at 11.15 AM.

Other participants include Paul Morley, James Bridle, Olia Lialina, Sarah Lowndes, Steven Bode, Francis McKee.

Presented by Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards, in parallel with the exhibition Tomorrow Never Knows: Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza - 8 June – 20 July 2013, at the CCA, Glasgow

Address: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall St. Glasgow, G2 3JD

Admission: £8 (includes lunch and refreshments)

information about the symposium and the day's schedule  + booking


LONDON - Monday June 24 - Energy Flash event at Rough Trade East - 7pm

Reading + dialogue with Luke Bainbridge (author of forthcoming acid house oral history) + audience Q/A


Address: Rough Trade East, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London, E1 6QL

information


BRISTOL - Thursday June 27 - Energy Flash event at Rise - 7pm

Reading + dialogue with John Doran of The Quietus + audience Q/A

Address: 70 Queens Road,  Bristol BS8 1QU

information

book news

The new expanded / updated edition of Energy Flash is out now.

Check here for further information about a London E-Flash event (Monday June 24, Rough Trade East) and a Bristol E-Flash event (Thursday June 27th, Rise).

I'll also be in Glasgow Saturday June 22 to give the keynote speech at Tomorrow Never Knows: 'The Future' Symposium. More information to follow.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

In other book news:

Energy Flash is coming out in a Spanish translation via the Barcelona based publishing house Contra.

Rip It Up and Start Again is coming out in a Spanish translation via the Buenos Aires based publishing house Caja Negra Editora.

Rip It Up and Start Again is coming out in a Polish translation via the publishing wing of Krytyka.

Retromania is coming out in a Russian translation via White Label Publishing.

Retromania is coming out in a Korean translation via the Seoul publisher Workroom.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Manuel fucking Gottsching!

His name contains the word "God".

interesting book (a series) #5

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture by Simon Warner

A super in-depth examination of the mutual influence and interaction between the Beat writers and the beat-makers, from Bob Dylan to Lee Ranaldo via Jim Carroll and  Tom Waits. Almost enough to make a Beat-nonbeliever such as myself give 'em another go. Then again, when there are still Nabokov novels unread...
 

interesting book (a series) #4

Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise by David Rothenberg

Fascinating guided tour of the stridulating and thrumming avant-gardes of the insect world, including such tiny but noisy critters as the katydid and and the magicicada.  Final instalment of the trilogy that includes Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Birdsong and Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music In A Sea of Sound. Paralleled by a CD, also titled Bug Music, of David Rothenberg (+ associates) jamming live with insect swarms or making a bug-based form of musique concrete.   Get the book here and the record here.

interesting book (a series) #3

READ & BURN: A Book About WIRE by Wilson Neate

Another meaty treatise (427 pages) but focused entirely on a single band, by the guy who already wrote a 150 page monograph on Pink Flag for the 33⅓ series.  Decisively displacing the existing much shorter (and out of print anyway) Wire tome   Wilson Neate's book is incisive, insightful and full of fascinating information. Of special interest to me was the stuff about the role of A.C. Marias / Angela Conway as art school associate of the band and creative input (particularly in the realm of visual presentation). And then one tiny morsel of data that delighted....   I've always thought there were certain things by The Groundhogs that had a proto-Wire angularity and jagged attack, and as it happens, when Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert first met (through the auspices of  Conway, in fact) they bonded musically through shared dislikes and a "few crucial tastes" in common: "Free, Beefheart, and two tracks by The Groundhogs".  That specific  - just "two tracks"! I'd bet money that one of them was "You Had A Lesson". I wonder what the other was...

interesting book (a series) #2

Mod: A Very British Style by Richard Weight

The entree to the appetizer that was Buttoned Up , Weight's meaty treatise on mod style + sensibility traverses from the movement's Fifties birth and Sixties prime through  the manifold stages and phases of its ongoing legacy, all its endless revivals resurgences echoes invocations, right up to such recent ebb-tide of the tradition occurrences as Ben Sherman's "A Heritage of Modernism" campaign and The Kaiser Chefs' mauling (mewling?) of "Pinball Wizard" at the Olympics closing ceremony.   Get it here.

interesting book (a series) #1

kicking off a new, sporadic series, about interesting books, mostly but not exclusively music-related :



All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Matters by Mark Dery

Boing Boing's first-ebook, this fascinating 8000-word monograph uses Mott the Hoople's Bowie-gifted signature anthem to unpack the meanings of glam, ranging from the etymology of the term "dude" to the "20s-style cover" of Mott's album and its evocation of " the coded homoeroticism of the ‘20s magazine illustrator J.C. Leyendecke", and all sluiced through the memories and p.o.v. of an Anglophile "growing up glam in  in ‘70s San Diego". Get it here.

On which subject, check out also Mark Dery's recent  e-book treatise for Thought Catalog on the history of American Anglophilia: England My England: Anglophilia Explained.

 

re. "invisible intruder" lyric in Luna C Project's "Edge of Darkness", sample-sleuth Matthew McKinnon has reason to believe it's the first track off this album by beyond-obscure early-Eighties pop group New Beginnings, barely a trace of which can be found on the internet outside of Discogs and a sample-identification site

Love this tune by Wavemaker, the duo of  Brian Hodgson (as in BBC Radiophonic Workshop, White Noise) and John Lewis. Released in 1977 on the album New Atlantis and recorded at Hodgson & Lewis's Electrophon studio, it's a synth prog workout with breakbeat-ish drummage from Tony McVey. But then this cascading, spangly-tingly melody-riff comes in (at 3.38) that's like a flash-forwards to Orbital's "Chime."


Love also the photo from the album back cover of Hodgson & Lewis topless, as featured here in the Youtube clip.

                                        


Big up to Nick Ekoplekz for putting "Echoes C" up there and turning me on to the Electrophon releases via Polydor (e.g. In A Covent Garden) in the first place.

New Atlantis, incidentally, is a concept album based around Francis Bacon's utopian novel, which is the source for the famous off-quoted "we have also sound-houses" bit that was something like Radiophonic Workshop's found-text mission statement.  Indeed "Echoes C" is part of the LP's "Echoes Suite ("We Also Have Sound Houses...")", which take up nearly all of side 2.

The "perspective houses" and "perfume houses" also sound pretty cool.