I'm off to Porto in Portugal for a festival in celebration of music writing, Porto Pop, where I'll be performing alongside compatriots John Robb, Vivien Goldman, Don Letts and Martin Aston.
My talk is on Sunday evening November 28 and it's titled "A Fast and Partial History of Pop Writing"
More information about the festival line-up, location and event times here.
And another Kieran P-R piece - this time on the inventor of (no really) dariacore, an 18-year-old called Zeke who records under the aliases dltzk and leroy.
"Hit play on a dariacore track, and within two minutes you might hear PinkPantheress; a squeaky-bed sound effect; the YouTuber Fred Figglehorn hollering, "Hey, it's Fred!"; a dolphin squealing; Vanessa Carlton making her way downtown; police sirens; and Yeat rapping, "She eat me up like it's Benibachi." The basic template is a breathless mishmash of recognizable songs pitch-shifted and layered over each other."
So mash-ups, even more mashed?
Here's a fun piece I did for 4Columns on an alternately sumptuously severe and gruesomely garish art book, Reversing Into the Future: New Wave Graphics 1977-1990 - a feast of album and single covers, tour posters, club flyers, music paper advertisements, merch and promo gimmicks, and sundry ephemera of the Noo Wave Era. Explores the punk / pink connection and the geometric aesthetic. Plus I got to use the word "stipple", knowledge fruits of having a dad who worked at a newspaper and would bring home materials from the office every so often.
Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds talking about music writing - his own and in general - in the newsletter Music Journalism Insider's regular feature Q&A.
And here's a few examples of Kieran's recent work for a different Insider - a piece on PinkPantheress, a profile of Quinn and a deep dive into the scapegoating of TikTok (cowritten with Palmer Haasch)
Check out also his overview of hyperpop for Omni (yes, that Omni)