"mapping the brainrot continuum"

Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum". 

There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life. 

E.g. 

"I think I always wanted to be a writer. When I was six, I made my own newspaper. But I also had that teenage rebellion thing where I thought that what my parents did was the lamest thing ever. I’d come home from school and my dad would be playing weird ambient alien sounds, and I’d think, 'I just want to go play Minecraft. Turn this off.' Then my mom would come home and she was exhausted every day from work. Both of my parents were like, 'This is the worst job. Do not follow in our footsteps'."

I must say I don't remember ever saying it was "the worst job", being a critic - after all, it's got a lot of upsides. 

But we did kind of hope he would choose a path that didn't lead to precarity. 

And we really didn't expect him to go down that same path. As a teenager he showed no interest at all. I always thought Kieran would do something involving video. Or invent an app.

But he's joined us in the incredible shrinking field. 

RIP Keith Dobson

RIP Keith Dobson of World Domination Enterprises, possibly the most exciting live band I have ever seen still to this day, and creators of the immortal "Asbestos Lead Asbestos".

Lovely bloke and he had the gift of the gab so fun to interview.

Keith - who once went as Kif Kif le Batteur - had a long  history with countercultural music going back to the ebb days of the actual counterculture - he drummed in the Gong-like festival band Here and Now. 

Then Keith plunged into the whole DIY culture with the cassette label Fuck Off  Records and his band The O12, when the credo was "bad music is soul music".

Then, using the same fell-into-its-own-weird-unique-tuning-stayed-there guitar as in O12, he formed World Domination Enterprises with himself snarling at the mic' and hacking at his axe, Digger pummeling the drums like a caveman, and Steve Jameson (who died six years ago) on dub rumbly bass.  

Big up to Chris Scott of Monitor who turned me onto World Dom in the first place.

World Domination Enterprises were on the cover of Melody Maker at least once - David Stubbs did the honors. 

Here's some of my own Melody Maker ravings about WDE

World Domination Enterprises featurette

summer 1986

live at The Underground, Croydon

Melody Maker, early 1987

with their pals MUTOID WASTE COMPANY
100 Club, London
Melody Maker, November 21st 1987

Let's Play Domination
Melody Maker, April 16th 1988

World Domination live at Hungarocarrot, Budapest summer 1988

The photo catches Keith's gold tooth nicely

Here's Stubbs remembering a jaunt to the Soviet Union with WDE

And a piece at the Quietus by Wyndham Wallace about Keith's whole story 

Well, you learn something everyday and I didn't know that the O12 did the original version of "Asbestos Lead Asbestos" in 1984

off this album Let's Get Proffessional

Vaporhaze

"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock":  bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.

Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names... 

Slackerdelia part 3? 

Well obviously part 1 is Mercury Rev, Pavement etc. 

But what would part 2 be? 

Chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, of course. 

Not the sound of the groups he's writing about particularly, but some of K's evocations of them reminded me of my favorite guitar album of the past 15 years: Suburban Tours by Rangers. 

Also the name of one of the bands, deer park, reminded me of the opening track "Deerfield Village".

I got into this record not long before we moved to LA and I think it somehow prepared me for suburban life in the land of perpetual summer.  Drifting through, dazed by light, mood oddly suspended between anomie and bliss.... 

As I recall, the album is inspired by living in Texas and the newbuilt suburbs, which often have names inspired by the wilderness they've supplanted - hence track titles like "Bear Creek", "Deerfield Village," "Woodland Hills," "Glen Carin."

That integration of wilderness and built-up areas is very LA and something that continues to enchant and unsettle - just the other day heading off to an on-the-early-side dental appointment we saw a mangy looking coyote in someone's driveway. This in a neighbourhood completely built-up with suburban houses, no wilderness or even parks nearby.

An early attempt to connect hypnagogic pop and Southern California while freshly enchanted as a new arrival. 

Then there's the Suburban Tours track "Out Past Curfew" - an allusion to the fact that some  towns in America actually have legal curfews for teenagers. You're not allowed out after sundown. 

Joe Knight has put out a bunch of excellent records since but here he tapped into something really magical-mystical - I bracket Suburban Tours with The Greatest Hit and Up On the Sun. 

Supposedly he drew some sideways inspiration from this song by Rush - not musically but the mise en scene 

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Another recent Rabbit Holed - K reports on SWAGGOTFEST, a 12-hour anarcho-pride parody of a music festival that transcended cringe and captured the sweetest, rawest aspects of the New York DIY scene