reading matters: bloggige roundup

Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active blogs. 

At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle.  Oh and I almost forgot: a cool post about Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records, triggered by an old (well 2014) Mike O doc on YouTube that Matt recommends.

At Sick Veg, he enthuses about a particularly nutritious grain and flour. 

And best of all at Hollow Earth - which I didn't even know was a blog - Matt has a lovely recollection of favorite animation from his childhood. This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film).  

Fascinating stuff about the raw techniques used by Bob Godfrey for Roobarb and Custard. 

Surprised by his abreactive feelings about Bagpuss: Smallfilms's Firmin and Postgate are celebrated instead for Ivor the Engine. 

Because of our age difference, I only have vague recollections of some of the other cartoons-for-kids that Matt rates, such as Paddington. 

Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation lead to  outcomes far more magical than the slick seamlessness afforded by digital technology: 

"What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy work could be summarised as: everyday settings, whole films made by a few people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imagery, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination."

The old skool animators understood "the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life."

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And here's some more notable bits of recent reading:

Michaelangelo Matos at Beat Connection has a cool post on the New Romantics (which I blog about here)

Mark Richardson at Beauty Blew A Fuse has some sweet thoughts about Erik Satie, Harold Budd and Aphex Twin. 

Geeta Dayal gives the Adele Bertei book No New York an interesting mixed review at 4Columns. 

Doubling back to animation, John Coulthart at { feuilleton } has a nice post about an animator I love, Piotr Kamler 

Me own flesh-and-blood, Kieran Press-Reynolds the Remorseless Writin' Machine has written about  twenty things since I last posted about their output.... But their most recent effort is this Rabbit Holed column on a genre that rejoices in the name Hardtekk and is all bound up with looksmaxxing and edits on TikTok etc. 

Over at The Quietus, Tim Burrows has a nice piece about the film he and Simon Poulter have made about Mark Fisher, titled We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (in which I appear briefly as a disembodied voice) 

Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has a post amusingly titled You Are Reading a Post About Making A Film About Mark Fisher - although at the time of writing he had yet to see the film, it's triggered by an article on Fisher and the doc at The Guardian. 

Promising new blogger Mister Magpie with a bunch of essays worth checking out, especially the one on Grouper. 

Neat post by musicologist Ethan Hein on The Band's "The Weight" - a song I loved as a child, oh-so-precociously recognised as different in atmosphere and gait from everything else on the radio (it was a medium-sized hit single in the UK, would you believe!). 

Talking about Canadians... as already noted at the Retromania blog, Split Infinities has a very interesting and evocative piece about Boards of Canada - written and posted shortly before, but now uncannily in synch with, the "are they returning or not" hoo-ha of recent days...  which deploys concepts like "Corduroy Psychedelia" and "PBS unconscious".

Great mix by DJ Food aka Kevin Foakes weaving together BoC and their source material + lodestar coordinates 

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Good lord, talking about nostalgia, as BoC inevitably involves...  this post is itself some kind of flashback to the olden golden days of blogging, when people linked each other and commented and kept the whole collective enterprise bubbling onwards in synergistic-symbiotic incestuous group-mind fashion... 

Well, not quite: I haven't coughed up much in the way of substantive commentary on most of these blogposts, but.... it's the thought that counts, eh? 

more reading matter

Had a fun chat with Lawrence of Mozart Estate / Go-Kart Mozart / Denim / Felt legend, condensed into this pithy Pitchfork Q+A 

Kieran on Kirkslop (it's what you think it is) for GQ

Did a bunch of interviews while in Argentina - this one by Romina Zanellato for Cenital is a good read (and can be easily flipped into English). 

Another one worth a look is Carlos Priego's for Le Tempestad but somewhere between AI doing the transcription and AI doing the translation (I'm guessing but I'd be surprised if wrong), somewhere between those processes and condensation of the conversation for space reasons, the most marvelous error has been generated. For during an explanation of the reasons for writing Retromania, I am said to have uttered these words:  

"I, in particular, had become addicted to U2, listening to all their albums and feeling like I was drowning in the past, so a lot of what I wrote had that feel."

It took me a while to realize what had happened - YouTube has been mis-transcribed as U2.

Except I wouldn't have said I had been addicted to YouTube. 

What I might have said is that I was addicted to downloading albums off blogs. There had been a long unhealthy phase of OCD / manic greed I got caught up in. To this day I have thousands and thousands of never-unzipped, never-played files stowed away….

reading matters: friends + family edition part 2

Another dispatch from the frontlines of 2020s music - although in this case it sounds freakily like 1970s music - here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a review of DOMi & JD BECK's hyper-fusion freakout Not Tight for Pitchfork 

A dispatch from the frontlines of 1970s music - my old Melody Maker comrade Frank Owen with a memory-lane guided tour to punk-era Manchester landmarks a.k.a. his old stomping ground. 

Dispatches drawn across decades in the form of Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Dance Songs, largely selected and written up by Michaelangelo Matos. Nice to see Mescalinum United "We Have Arrived" in there - in between Fatboy Slim and somebody called Oliver Heldens. 

reading matters: family + friends edition

Dispatch from the frontlines of 2020s music, a review of quinn's new album by Kieran Press-Reynolds for Pitchfork.

Dispatches from the frontlines of late '80s and early '90s music from David Stubbs, in the form of reminiscences of:

- an audience with Chuck D of Public Enemy 

- a trip to  Russia to follow World Domination Enterprises on a groundbreaking tour of the Soviet Union

Dispatches from the frontlines of cutting-edge TV (re)viewing, a.k.a our sofa, here's Joy Press writing about

-  the underrated Industry (a shared favorite, this - a raunchy, druggy glimpse into the real world domination enterprise, a.k.a international finance)  

- rewatching the pilot episode of Mad Men on the 15th anniversary of its airing 

-   Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal  

link think

I have fallen out of the habit of linking to things.

I guess we all have.

Which makes the "we" in that sentence even more tenuous.

But I'm thinking about mounting a counter-entropic tendency. Considering getting back into the habit of linking to things I've read and liked, or read and disagreed with. Quoting them - perhaps even commenting on them, if I can muster the energy.

And here's a good place to start. The Impostume - aka Carl Neville - musing about blog nostalgia:

"On some level I am bored of and by Internet 2.0 though I am not quite sure what that means. I don't think I am nostalgic for pre- or early internet days, though some of the reflections in Alex Niven's upcoming New Model Island, on the early days of blogging, has chimed in with a way my thoughts and feelings, possibly my needs and desires have been tending for a while. I think a return to blogging, precisely because it has fallen into desuetude, precisely because no-one now is really listening or reading, appeals. What was always nice about it was partly the a-sociallity, you wrote something and then had no idea who had read it, or what anyone thought and nor did you have to care particularly. It was/is both public and private but somehow it could command an intimacy, an invisible meeting of minds, lives, semi or totally anonymously. what you wrote was out there somehow working away in the world and you never knew how. You had connected but without any of the burdens of sociality, without the need for an exchange.

"It's that particular mode of non-exchange, the lack of reaction, the idea of something going quietly out there, the message in a bottle, a misdirected letter, sender unknown that I like. a certain distance is needed for people to really meet, a certain hiddenness needed before you can really speak."

Hmm, interesting thoughtage, as always, from Carl there - although personally I feel the opposite: I miss the sociality of blogging - the remote collectivity. As exemplified by the decades blogs that Carl set up: joint projects, people taking turns to do a post, but also a lot of stimulating chit-chat in the comments. Another example would be the inter-blog and guest-contributed  commentary on "themes" that I or others would host, on things like guitar riffs, or drummige, or solos, or bass bits. And many other forms of conversation-building and ideas-pooling that took place at shared-blogs or within blog-clusters, including those from opposed camps back in those days when there was ideological friction enough for sides to be taken.

Meanwhile, Carl is taking a break from finishing up his new novel Eminent Domain - the follow-up but not sequel to the splendid Resolution Way - in an unusual way. By starting another novel, The Fullfillment* Centre,  micro-excerpts of which are being previewed at the blog, starting here. I'm already gripped, it's like reading a serial.

In the course of one chapter, Carl, or his character/proxy, drops this nice thought:

"There’s an old quote about buying books: we think we are buying the time to read them, but having been a hoarder myself when I was younger I understand it differently, we were buying the selves we imagined we would become after we had read them, the great works, the great thoughts and each one bought was a new possible self, our own future greatness, claimed, set aside, each one sold on a small grief for that self’s loss, our future diminished. The dizziness in libraries or bookshops, the circling of souls, selves, worlds. It was easy to get trapped there, enchanted, enchained."

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Another online thought-bunker  I've come across recently is Modernism Unbound, which looks like a webzine but appears to be a one-man enterprise, the work of Jon Lindblom.  Here's an essay on the drug-tech interface and rave culture of the Nineties. And here's one on the drug-tech interface in more recent years, looking at anti-depression and anti-anxiety meds and late capitalist culture. There doesn't seem to be a musical angle to that essay, though, which I think misses a trick - or at least, the essay I am really waiting and wanting to read is about the sonic interface between trap / mumble rap production and drugs like Percoset, Xanax, etc. What kind of subjectivity is produced by the leisure abuse of prescription drugs like these -  and how has this manifested sonically, and in terms of vocal styling? I have yet to come across a piece that even describes from inside the specific high induced by improper, non-medicinal use of these drugs and their polydrug combination with various other substances, like cough syrup or the traditional illegal buzzes... let alone explore deeply the potentiating synergy with particular sound-textures, Auto-Tune, etc.

(This is my own contribution, but it lacks the er field research element that would really be required, if you get me).

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Also on rave and the drug-tech interface (well, kinda) is this essay about the Eurohardcore continuum and gabber, by Jeppe Ugelvig at NERO Editions, which I have annotated and commentated upon already at the other place.

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A nice tribute by Richard Williams at The Blue Moment to Peter Hammill, now 70 years old but  not about to stop any time soon. Indeed he has just released  In Amazonia, a collaboration with  Swedish group Isildurs Bane. Writes Williams:

"Listening to it the first time, my first thought was that this was how progressive rock should have turned out. The music is characterised by a sense of inquiry and a delight in exploring resources... while the lyrics strive for the effect of poetry.... It arrives at a place where European rock music seemed to be heading when it veered away from American influences 50 years ago."


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Odds and sods:

A piece by Rosie Spinks at Quartzy arguing that the age of the influencer is dead (or should be) and that it's high time for the return of the slacker

Always a pleasure to read Mike Powell on Vampire Weekend - love the description of Rostam as the band's "Swiss Army knife" - but just like with his write-up of their previous album, it really doesn't sound like an album I'd extract pleasure listening to. But I've had that reaction with every Father of the Bride review I've come across.

Finally here's a Resonance FM show about postpunk-era Australian experimental label M-Squared - the program is the work of Superfluid, a monthly radio show and events organisation based in London.