"jumping iz not a crime"

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a guest piece at Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor, while the main man takes a vacation.  It's a report on "the holy hell of cursed jumpstyle" - a zoomer-oriented TikTok-propelled twist to the gabber continuum.  

"vyrval’s ballistic banger is the biggest tune in a growing wave of psychotic jumpstyle music that seems made to express existential fears: technology has gone too far, we’ve broken the world beyond repair, autocratic autobots will soon seize control...  In the comments of the clips that accompany these songs, people write what’s basically apocalyptic science-fiction, imagining grim future scenarios: “Me watching an AI generated video of me doing the most atrocious War crime ever.” The visual aesthetic mirrors the freakiness: unsettling cyber graphics are superimposed on neon landscapes, with distorted limbs and objects."

"At its most baleful, these songs obliterate any and all melody, leaving listeners with no chance for reprieve from their unrelenting assault. Dj Svevsx’s “jumpstyle (1)” has over 8 million plays and it’s just a 42-second spasm of feculent kicks." 

Looks bit like the Moving Shadow logo, that silhouette. 

Weathered legend returns to youth currency 

What K calls "peak slumpstyle" - the slowed + reverb remix 

Lithuian "nu-jumpstyle Jesus" Yabujin 

And his alter-ego

"What makes this internet-addled aesthetic so addictive is the way it taps into the younger generation’s collectively fried childhoods. It’s a shitposty Tower of Babble that crosses countries and languages."

Talking of shitpostmodernism, Kieran is quoted in this Kyle Chayka article in The New Yorker on corecore and "The Dada Era of Internet Memes"

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

The uglier aspects of this scene reminded me a bit of this spoof  and spoof pt 2 I concocted back in 2007 (inspired by guesswho)

Old post on hardstyle, a related genre that has some militaristic undercurrents... well, overcurrents really

Jumpstyle in simpler, happier, more innocent days. 

Futuromania - out today!

The UK edition of Futuromania is out today on White Rabbit ! 

Via select record stores, comes with a limited edition freezine of bonus pieces! 

Check out this radio show about Futuromania I pulled together for NTS - also available at Soundcloud and Mixcloud. 

Here's an interview I did with Metal magazine's Lainie Wallace about the book. 

Here's a chat I had with Moonbuilding's Neil Mason. 

And here's a conversation with Bill Proctor for his electro-history podcast Spacelab 

Watch this space for news about more podcast appearances, webzine and radio interviews, and  upcoming events. 

US edition  out May 7 via Hachette

Futuromaniac playlists -  Spotify -   Spotify (long mix) -  Tidal (longest mix)

About the book: 

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music’s future - the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience.  But it’s also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other. 

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software. 

Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

Mania!

Unless we count caffeine,  I've never used a stimulant - or any kind of drug - to help with writing. Not even during the most against-all-odds of all-nighters, or when facing a pile-up of deadlines.... not even in that marathon-turned-to-sprint last leg of completing a book. 

Staring down a delivery crisis, the idea of resorting to some kind of writer's little helper, a chemical crutch, has occasionally felt tempting....  but ultimately seemed strategically unwise. What if I wrote a load of drivel in a manic state? (Okay, okay, I can see the quip coming here - let's say "more so than  the usual"). What if I just lost it completely? (Certain colleagues and their amphetamine misadventures gave me a dire warning there).

Better to power through the exhaustion, jacked up on an accelerant cocktail of will and fear and caffeine.

So I read with interest these essays at Pioneerworks / Broadcast about Adderall use, and how apparently chronic and widespread it is. 

Particularly, it seems, with those who work with text - writing it, reading it. 

The piece by Amber A’Lee Frost on how an editor can recognise if a writer is "on the stuff" was especially interesting.  She says she can spot the Adderall House Style instantly and breaks it down into various categories of symptoms:

Endless revision

Fixation on minutiae, leading to paralysis

Sprawl - the piece gets too long, goes on too many tangents, the writer can't bring themselves to throw away any of the juicy bits of information, ideas, quotes, jokes they've come up with

Punchy - wisecracking tone. 

Punchiness - picking fights, a prickly, combative, point-scoring tone.

Epiphanies - bolts of illusory revelation. 

Paranoia - spotting hidden patterns, secret connections.

What I wondered, though, scanning this list of total-give-away hallmarks of Adderall-addled prose, was - aren't many of them simply hallmarks of being a writer? Inherent tendencies towards which writers are prone? 

Especially in the age of word-processing, when you can fiddle away at things endlessly, finessing a phrase or moving things around structurally (whereas in the age of the typewriter, the commitment of the key struck and the carriage return imposed a certain finitude, a propulsive thrust onwards toward the "finished" line).  

Especially, also, in the age of the internet, where the research process so insidiously and irresistibly slides into protraction, a seeping sideways into adjacent avenues. 

But I've known fellow writers, who I'm fairly certain weren't on anything except their internal supplies of obsessiveness, who produced 20 thousand word pieces when they had been asked for 4000 tops... who have delivered the copy weeks or months late... who got so tangled up in research, they never completed at all. 

A few times in my life I've been that person, or near enough.

In a sense, the unconscious motivation of writing - or one of them - is to get oneself into this "high performance" state, also known as "flow", being "in the zone", etc. 

The work itself is the drug.

Maybe you have a kind of internal-Adderall latent within you, as a potential - it's what you tap. 

The doing of the work is dopaminergic.

You get high on these self-generated chemicals, and then the symptoms that Amber A’Lee Frost enumerates emerge.

Maybe the Adderall is just a shortcut, for those who want to get "there" quicker, as soon as possible? 

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

Another thought:

All these tendencies 

endless revision  / fixation on minutiae / sprawl /  excessive wisecracking / punchiness / illusory epiphany / paranoia 

These are the Zone of Fruitless Intensification stage of "the right stuff" - virtues turned to self-defeating vices...  necessary strengths that, pushed too far, become weaknesses.

Dial each of them back a bit, back into the fruitful zone, and you have:  

perfectionism / detail-orientation / fecundity / wit / polemical edge / insight / pattern-recognition

Futuromania!

My ninth book is out in a couple of weeks time! 

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today is a themed collection about music and the future, looking at the intersection between science fiction and pop, and exploring "the rhetorics of temporality."

release rationale:

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music’s future - the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience.  But it’s also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other. 

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.  

A tapestry of the scenes and subcultures that have proliferated in that febrile, sexy and contested space where man meets machine, Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

UK edition 11 April 2024 via White Rabbit

Via select record stores, the first five hundred copies come with a freezine with bonus pieces

                              

US edition on Hachette out on May 7.

For a flavor of futuromaniac music, try these playlists

Quick tour of future pop - Spotify

Extended odyssey into the future frontier - Spotify, Tidal

Finally, I've started a blog (yet another blog!) dedicated to the book: Futuromania,  which will initially be a place for news about Futoromania appearances on podcasts and in the media, interviews, and events, and then later will develop into a repository for all the "future music"-related writings I've done over the years that didn't make it into this volume. 

x

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS / BOOKS OF NOTE

A mate of mine - a Matt of mine, even - Matthew Worley has a new and excellent book out in a week's time: Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976–88. Via Reaktion Books.

Here's what I was happy to offer by way of an endorsement: 

"Intensely researched, teeming with insights and fresh connections, Matthew Worley’s book is the definitive study of punk and postpunk fanzine culture. If you want to know why zines mattered - why zines got people so excited - this is where you should start” 

So definitive and encompassing is Zerox Machine that there is a chapter towards the end in which Monitor is covered, with quotes from myself and David Stubbs.  

Release rationale: 

Zerox Machine is an immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its associated fanzines from 1976 to 1988. Drawing on an extensive range of previously unpublished materials sourced from private collections across the UK, Matthew Worley describes and analyses this transformative era, providing an intimate glimpse into the hopes and anxieties that shaped a generation.

Far more than a showcase of covers, this book examines the fanzines themselves, offering a rich tapestry of first-hand accounts, personal stories and subcultural reflections. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Matthew Worley captures the spirit and essence of British youth culture, not only shedding new light on a pivotal movement in music history but crafting a unique alternative history of Britain in the 1970s and ’80s.

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

Another recent book of note  is  Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women.  

Published by Contingent Sounds out of Berlin and co-edited by Luis Alvarado of Buh Records, a Peruvian label that specialises in reissuing Latin American avant-garde and experimental music, this  book represents a double decentering of the received narrative about electronic music history: it focuses on the Latin American contribution, and further focuses on the role of female pioneers such as Beatriz Ferreyra, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, and Nelly Moretto, among many others.

Release rationale: 

"The official history of 20th-century avant-garde electronic music has been predominantly narrated from the point of view of Anglo-American and Western European experiences and largely remained focused on its male protagonists. To destabilize this history, this editorial project presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book also brings us closer to the work of a new generation of researchers who have focused on offering a non-canonical reading of the history of music and technology in Latin America. The publication is the record of a new vision, an account of the condition of being a woman in the field of music technology at a time when this was a predominantly masculine domain.... 

"The texts that make up this publication are organized spatially and conceptually, rather than following a chronology. The selection of female composers profiled sheds light on a variety of relevant aspects: key musical contexts, experiments with technologies (such as tape, electronic synthesis, the first commercial synthesizers), diverse formats (i.e., radio art, electroacoustic pieces, installation, multimedia, theater, film, etc.), intertwined with themes, such as migration, memory, identity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, social engagement, the acceptance of electronic music, etc. Moreover, the framework of this editorial project opened a space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics, as many of the authors gathered as collaborators are composers and sound artists themselves....

Edited by: Luis Alvarado and Alejandra Cárdenas

Composers and sound artists featured in this historical account include: 

Alicia Urreta, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elsa Justel, Eulalia Bernard, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Ileana Pérez Velázquez, Irina Escalante Chernova, Iris Sagüesa, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, Leni Alexander, Margarita Paksa, Marietta Veulens, Mónica O’Reilly Viamontes, Nelly Moretto, Oksana Linde, Patricia Belli, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, Rocío Sanz Quirós, Teresa Burga, Vania Dantas Leite, among others.

Playlist at The Wire magazine

YouTube Playlist 

Bad Company

 I think I've probably played games less than 20 times in my life.  (Unless we're counting Pong, which my granny had for some reason). Despite unfamiliarity with the whole area, its idiolect and lingo, I  could understand this fascinating Vulture piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds on the outwardly mystifying appeal of the game Lethal Company. A grim, grinding parody of precarious work conditions under late capitalism, it's set in outer space, where players are peons tasked with resource extraction for a mysterious corporation. 

"Every round, the quota is raised until it’s literally impossible to succeed. There’s no Employee of the Month awards, no daily check-ins with the boss, no OSHA regulations — simply ever-escalating toil, followed by death."  

The pay-off is a cathartic displacement of the stresses and anxieties of your non-game working life:

"The faceless megacorp ejected us from the ship. We couldn’t stop giggling as we watched our bodies disappear in the ether."

 

Bama

Love this video, love this song - the video made by my son Eli with his creative partner Max Schneiderman, the single is by their super-talented friend Julia Robyn.

"Divine Decadence Darling!"

I had a lovely time talking with Jeremy Gilbert and Tim Lawrence for their triffic music + politics podcast Love Is the Message. Our chat covered glam and punk and postpunk, themes of suburbia and boredom and the political economy of 1970s Britain. You can listen to the deftly-condensed and music-illustrated conversation at Apple or Spotify or Patreon

RIP Damo Suzuki

Not Damo-specific although he appears here and there, check out mash-up-ologist Tom Caruana's Can-tribute-via-loop-distillation release Inner Space - there's an instrumental version and then one (the primary one in fact) which uses these de facto Can breakbeats as a base for rappers to do their thing.

Jump to 40.09 for the Vit C meets MC merger (in this case Denmark Vessey)

"Vitamin C" is used in the first episode of Baz Luhrmann's early days of hip hop drama The Get Down - you see a graffiti-daubed subway train rattling along an overground / overhead track and the hypertense rhythm engine rattles and clicks along with it.  

Check out also Woebot aka Matthew Ingram's Damo-endorsed video "Vitamin C" which uses the tune as its intro and outro, but is also a lovely bit of edutainment on the subject of asorbic acid - its discovery and its properties.

RIP Christopher Priest

 

I think have only read the one book by Christopher Priest - A Dream of Wessex. Read it when it first came out, borrowed from Berkhamsted library (almost certainly the edition pictured above). And then I  read it again in the 2010s, having picked up a hardback of the original US edition (mystifyingly retitled The Perfect Lover) at Glendale's s.f. + fantasy specialist shop Mystery and Imagination (now sadly closed but continuing as a mail order / internet operation). 

I have had copies of Fugue for a Darkening Island and Inverted World awaiting my attention for some time now. 

Two different copies of Fugue. He revised it for a later edition, muting some of its potentially offensive aspects (the scenario is social collapse / fascism in the U.K., caused by an overwhelming influx of refugees owing to war and famine). So when I realised I had bought the 'corrected' version, I had to get the original, didn't I?  (The title itself - "darkening island" -  is questionable... but Priest was no Powellite, indeed he revised the novel because he hated the idea of being misunderstood). 

Been meaning to check out The Glamour (title allures for obvious reasons) and The Prestige  (saw the film) and others in that single-noun-title series-not-series of his 

Reading John Clute's obituary at the Guardian, I see that he also wrote an intriguing WW2 alternative history, The Separation. 

But yes, Christopher Priest - one of those New Wave of British s.f. writers who lit up my mind prior to the plunge into music and music journalism. I'm grateful to all these writers, and their American counterparts. They stirred my imagination (for a while, stirred ambitions too - to become a s.f. and alternative history writer). And they provided escape during a turbulent upbringing. 

Apparently, at his death, Priest was working on a nearly but not quite completed study of J.G. Ballard, his biggest influence and a mentor. Hope that gets put out. 

Neil, continued

Tributes keep coming... 

Here's one you should really read - a loving portrait from his close friend Simon Price, full of details and stories I never knew. For The Quietus.

Update February 1st: lovely extended meditation by Cam Scott on Neil and specifically his book Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir . Here's a mix Neil made to go along with Eastern Spring. 

David Stubbs directs Kulkarni fans to a classic installment of the Chart Music podcast, in which Neil rails against the turn-to-shite of Melody Maker in the final years of the '90s, late period Britpop, the infamous "Craig David" cover, etc. From about 35 mins in...  

David's Gofundme for Neil's daughters has just topped 40K - an amazing testament to the love and respect he inspired. Contribute if you can.

Neil's colleagues at The Wire have assembled a medley of his pieces for the magazine across 20 years of being a contributor.  They have also published what may well one of Neil's last bits of writing - they invited him to pick - and comment on - his own favorite pieces written by other people from The Wire's vast archives.

Apparently there are plans afoot for a Neil Kulkarni anthology. Below are a few links to classic pieces that are already online - some of them rant-mode and some just passionately perceptive about music he loved. 

Neil lays into the Ten Most Overrated Albums in Pop History - guaranteed to be something here that'll get your hackles rising. 

Neil in dialogue with Rudy Tambala of  A.R. Kane around the time of the One Little Indian singles anthology (which reminds me that I've still not read his sleevenotes to last year's Kane box A.R.Kive - can anybody help me out here?)

Neil's series  A New Nineties, about the groups that have come to be known as The Lost Generation - i.e. first-wave UK post-rock. For The Quietus:

introduction / Main

Disco Inferno

Insides

Pram

epilogue / other unmissable albums / rant about bands making music that is "unforgivably British"

He also did a follow-up Quietus series about the US end of the "New Nineties", worth looking for although some of the groups, the appeal always eluded me I must say. 

Here's a couple of pieces Neil did on Marc Bolan and T.Rex 

A piece around a Pulp reunion tour, celebrating the band and what it represented

Neil with Sleeper (and all indie) and Kula Shaker in his sights. And damning Ride with faint abuse.

Via Nick S in comments, a clip of Neil blasting Oasis on the Chart Music podcast

Neil as Coventry native remembering local boy Terry Hall.

Neil on Auto-Tune-glitzed 'n' spritzed dancehall

Finally, a bit of Kulkarni meta-talk... Neil was fierily eloquent about music journalism as a vocation, the point and purpose of criticism, how to do it right.... often this would come out by implication, a sort of photographic negative, in his tirades about the shite that the latterday NME was trying to foist on the world, famous feats of fight-picking that riled up the guilty parties no end. But here at Drowned In Sound, is one of his positive articulations of How to Do It and Why To Do It. 

RIP Neil Kulkarni

Stunned, heartbroken, by the news about Neil Kulkarni.

I never met Neil in the flesh but I feel like I did, his personality is so vivid in his writing, and as a social media presence and podcaster. By the time Neil started coming down to Melody Maker from Coventry, I would have been mostly in New York. I did have some lovely phone conversations with him when getting him to review rap records for Spin (his opinions annoyed some of my staider colleagues - mission accomplished!). But mostly I know him through his writing and his presence on Facebook, where he'd be chatting about the stuff of everyday life as much as music ( he was enormously knowledgeable and opinionated about crisps, for instance! And one of his last tweets was a photo he took of a large Swiss roll someone mysteriously left on a stairwell banister). 

As a music writer, Neil Kulkarni is one of the greats - the kind of stylist and personality born for (and born in) the UK’s weekly music press. Like many readers I expect, my favorite Neil mode was the rant – these were things of great rhythmic beauty, deadly in their accuracy - incendiary devices that incensed their deserving targets. The energy he could transmit through words was extraordinary. But Neil wrote in many other modes beyond the polemical and shouty -  ruminative and tender, for instance, in the pieces for The Quietus that evolved into Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir, his 2012 book for Zer0. 

"Life force" is a phrase I keep seeing in tributes. I so wish I’d felt the heat of it up close and in person, but it blazed through his writing. It seems inconceivable that this fire has been extinguished, way too early.  The world feels colder today. 

My heart goes out to Neil's daughters, partner, and family;  his friends;  his colleagues past and present;  his bandmates;  his students;  and his fans and readers.

Close friend and fellow Chart Music podcaster David Stubbs has started a Go-Fund Me for Neil's children. 

Neil aged 18 going on 19, in 1991, just before starting to write for Melody Maker.

Tributes from his friends and editors and colleagues are too numerous to list here, but here's a few to start with

Simon Price meets the moment with this loving portrait at The Quietus

Derek Walmsley, who worked with Neil at the Wire, remembers him at his blog Slow Motion

Chart Music's mainman Al Needham 

Carl Loben at DJ

David Stubbs at Electronic Sound

Ian King at Unexpected Delirium on NK and loss in the age of parasocial media

In the coming week, I will pull together some of Neil's pieces for a post on Pantheon. Here's a couple that already appeared. 

Head Over Heels about "shitpost-modernism"

Gutted about what's happened to Pitchfork.

Bizarrely, both me and my son had pieces pending when the news came - and they've both just run. 

One of the great things about Pitchfork is the space they've given to young writers to go wide and deep (old writers too!). Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a thinkpiece on shitpost-modernism: "the flood of 2020s music that straddles the line between serious and silly, shattering conventions and exploding taste boundaries".

One of my favorite things - as a reader and a contributor - Pitchfork does is the Sunday Review: writers going long and deep on records the magazine never covered before, usually because they came out long before the website existed. After a tough week, it feels bittersweet to be this Sunday’s Reviewer, with a paean to Cocteau Twins and Head Over Heels, one of my favorite albums of all time.

In the piece, I reference a rave review in NME that turned my head around after initially finding the album off-putting. By Barney Hoskyns, that review can be read here at Pantheon.  And here (also here as scans) is a much later piece where Barney interviews Cocteau Twins about the length and breadth of their career.

On the subject of music journalists and music journalism, there's been a lot of interesting, if necessarily anguished commentary about what happened at Pitchfork and the future for criticism. I particularly like these thoughts for NPR music from Ann Powers, especially the last of her three points: 

"To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects.... What I love about music writing , though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen.....  I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight....  In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun.... Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it"

Absolutely - music and music writing are alike in being one of life's essential inessentials. You can get by without either of them - but why would you want to?  

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

postscript: former Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson with some fond reminiscences about colleagues who abruptly no longer work there either anymore.

the original doomscroller

As the end of a year approaches, Sasha Frere-Jones invites writers, musicians, and artists to come up with some words about that year.  "Reflections on 2023" went up on his Substack on January 1st and it includes some thoughts from me about doomscrolling. You'll have to - haha - scroll down a ways to find it, though, as he's got a hell of a lot of guests and some of the contributions are quite lengthy. 

The gist of my micro-essay is that the doomscroll is a new affect, brought about by a convergence of technologies. To achieve that specific mental-physical sensation in the pre-digital era would have required cobbling together a Professor Branestawm/Rube Goldberg-style construction, a rotational contraption through which would pass at speed a ribbon onto which was glued stories clipped out of the newspapers. But the ribbon would run out... and it's the inexhaustibility, the endlessly renewed quality of the scroll that induces those fixated feelings of panic and paralysis. 

About a week after the reflections went up, though, I stumbled across a precedent! 

Something on Twitter (more on that in a minute) led me to look up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall":

Bob Dylan attributed his inspiration to the feeling he got when reading microfiche newspapers in the New York Public Library: "After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song."

Dylan, original doomscroller! 

And the microfiche reader is a machine that you crank manually - so not unlike my mad-inventor contraption. (You can watch someone actually using one in the 1960s here).

The reason I was looking up "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" is a Twitter thread, started by someone who proclaimed that: 

"the music opinion I have that people would hate me for is that I truly think Bob Dylan is underrated, like severely underrated. and that he’s maybe the single most interesting person alive on earth right now. and that no other living artist even comes close to his significance"

Someone else chipped in with a hard agree: 

"It’s like living at the same time as Shakespeare"

Then someone else co-signed using a George Harrison quote: "There’s not a lot of people in the world who I see from a historical point of view. Five hundred years from now, looking back in history, I think he will still be the man. Bob, he just takes the cake.” 

And then - in what was turning into a competition between Dylan nuts to say the most Dylan-nutty thing ever -  yet another person declared that the line “Where black is the color, where none is the number” alone merited the Nobel Prize.

Not being a Dylan-nut, not in the least, I had to google the line, which led me to "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

An enduring bemusement for me, this phenomenon of the Dylan-nut. D-nuts are forever quoting lyrics, brandishing them as if the most profound utterances ever uttered -  oracular, Bible-level stuff. They seem to like the parable-like cadence, or the old-timey American quality: plainspoken yet poetic. Sometimes, they'll talk about how funny a particular line is. (I'm always like, "really?") 

"Where black is the color, where none is the number” - partly it's the way it's sung, I should imagine. But as a stand-alone line, stripped of intonation, taken out of the mounting intensity of the rest of the lyrics, that particular line strikes me as.... fine.  

Of course (I've written about this before), Dylan would not make my Top 1000. Not contesting the  objective eminence, the historical importance, here - just talking about what I personally would reach for as something to listen to.  

Still, Bob did invent doomscrolling, so there's that.  

I wonder if he owns a dumbphone and actively doomscrolls today. Perhaps he'll write another "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". Then again, he doesn't need to. It's a hardy perennial. 

postcript: A Britrap doomscroll from the mid-2000s

the final (connect_i)cut

Talking about blogs operated by musicians, word comes that the last ever album by connect_icut, also known as Sam Macklin and whose nom de blog was Bubblegum Cage III - is now out on the Blasted Gorse label. 

And it's really excellent, weaving Sam's abiding passions for early UK post-rock (Disco Inferno and that kind of thing), left-field electronic music, glitch, et al, into a shimmering final statement. Nice late period ECM-ish cover design too.

But it's not the last we'll hear of Macklintronica -  simply the retiring of a particular identity and the launch of a new direction. 

Check out his back catalogue while you're about it. 

blogging, continued

Xenogothic with some thoughts on blogging.  

Among many other things, Matt talks about blogs operated by musicians, by the likes of Deerhunter and Phil Elverum, as a whole other field of bloggy action. I suppose Momus's Click Opera,  mentioned in the previous Blissblog post about blogs then and now, counts in this category. In an earlier longer version of the Guardian column, I did link to a currently active music-maker blog that I enjoy: Wreckless Eric's Ericland. 

I have been going back and adding more blogs and bloggers that I remembered from the olden days to that post. But there are still swathes of blogging that I didn't cover - even within the music blogging arena.

For instance, I don't talk about MP3 blogs. But then they were never something I got into. The free MP3s seemed as unenticing as the flexi singles attached to fanzines back in the day. And the textual element rarely seemed as interesting as the output of the blogs I considered my true neighbours.

There was a whole other phase of hyperactive blogging I clean forgot about - all the blogs associated with hypnagogic pop and that late 2000s / early 2010s emergence of largely-online DIY micro-genres like witch house and vaporwave.  Blogs such as 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Visitation Rites and Gorilla vs. Bear and Rose Quartz that would be shepherded for a while under the Pitchfork-hosted mantle of Altered Zones.  I tried to evoke its neophiliac fever in this piece:

On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there’s no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one’s name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today’s musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.... This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. 

Another huge wave of blog energy - and one that had a huge effect on me, albeit not necessarily for the good - was the whole-album sharing blogs. Some of these didn't just offer an album cover image and a link to Rapidshare / Megaupload  / Mediafire, but had proper textual content: well-written and informative, if rarely polemical or argument-starting. Serious curatorial activity, as undertaken by the likes of Mutant Sounds, Continuo's, Twice Zonked!, A Closet of Curiosities... I wrote about that scene in this piece for The Wire on "sharity" blogs. Even interviewed a couple of figures behind blogs.  That scene is much declined from its height but there's sharity soljas out there still, digging strange shit up... 

Yet another still active sub-subculture of music blogging: the "imaginary albums" blogs. This overlaps with the sharity in so far as they sometimes - not always - share their recreation of the rumored but never released album. Some of these blogs generate an enormous amount of counterfactual text, as discussed in this essay of mine on alternative history and music: 

Fans for years have been creating unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's  Smile, Hendrix’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's  Get Back, the Who’s Lifehouse – using bootlegs, demos, out-takes... Today there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice – Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums. 

Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry Peppers, don’t stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers – they write incredibly detailed and extensive alternative histories of worlds where the Beatles didn’t split up, or where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don’t leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett stayed in Pink Floyd.  A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.  

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In addition to Xenogothic, there's been some other post-Guardian-piece posts -  a few from blogs I know well (like Feuilleton), most from blogs I'd never come across before:  Torpedo The Ark, Bhagpuss, The Sphinx. Somewhere amidst all that chatter I gleaned that there's been  unconnected blog talk going on too, at The Lazarus Corporation, at Velcro City Tourist Board, and in a piece about the internet getting weird again by Anil Dash for Rolling Stone.