Rather aptly there is an adapted excerpt from the book about slackers in The Idler, where Still In A Dream is Book of the Week. That's online - meanwhile in the print edition, Cathi Unsworth reviews it.
A MEDLEY OF REVIEWS + READER REACTIONS
"A history of the music twinned with an account of the music press that covered it. That slight dip into autobiography spurs grander questions about what the point of music and music criticism is... His statement on what all that work ultimately means is significant to me. Like Harold Bloom or David Thomson – the opinions are less valuable than the sheer enthusiasm with which they are expressed. A brilliant critic has the authority and verve to move you to try something you haven’t heard of before just through the power of their words." - Ilia, Goodreads
"Both eulogy and manifesto, Still in a Dream is an enthralling, nostalgic meditation on formative, lost-in-music moments and an eloquent, enduring argument for an art of bliss and bewilderment" - -Declan Long, ArtReview
"Read it for Reynolds's argumentative vigour and his enthralled immersion in the music he adores"
- Teddie Jamieson, The Herald, 12 best music books of the year so far
"An insightful history, mixed with fond memoires of writing for Melody Maker, one of the weekly "inkies" in the UK's exuberantly opinionated music press" ― Financial Times, Best Books of the Summer
"What a fantastic book this is! It is, I think, the finest work by the best living music writer." - Martin Raybould, Goodreads
"An absolutely sublime lovesong to the era, could read over and over" - Jazmine, Goodreads
"A pleasure to read!" - Iggy Pop Barker, amazon.co.uk
"Despite being 464 pages, it breezed by... It might be the most brisk, easy read of any of his books, and I enjoyed it immensely" - Fast and Bulbousblog
"Surprised even myself by how much I enjoyed and devoured this book. Just loved it... Over 400 pages and I wished it was longer" - Robert, Goodreads
"I read this in two days flat: that's how much I enjoyed it.... It is more personal than his other books, but without being self-indulgent." - William, Goodreads
"As blissful as the cover, as wondrous as the swathes of music Simon Reynolds goes into detail on.... a glorious celebration of music." - Top10Nathan
“My final verdict is that the book is so readable I want to re-read a few chapters again, just live in all this music and splendor... A lot of humor and wit, some post-40 wisdom that only comes from looking back…" WaneLietoc, r/indieheads
"Still In A Dream is at once erudite and expansive - it does what the most convincing bands he's writing about managed to pull off: open doors to other worlds" - Miloš Hroch, The Wire
"A perfect accompaniment to Rip It Up and Start Again. Thank you Simon for bringing back so many memories" --Bookends(Amazon.co.uk reviewer)
"I've never dropped everything so fast to read a book immediately after receiving my pre-order.... It met my sky-high expectations" - Richard Balmer (Goodreads)
"These years clearly have much fondness attached to them from him which makes this a joy to read." - Aaron Hodgetts (Goodreads)
"Reynolds is a great writer. Many visceral, haptic descriptions of music that made me immediately put the book down and look up whatever song he was waxing lyrical about.... A lot of this reads like an impassioned plea for the value of criticism " - Luke McCarthy (Goodreads)
"A very fun and approachable writer " - Ben Yaxley, Goodreads
"I have never gone to the bookstore and bought a book as fast in my life" - Jo, Goodreads
"Was incredible and Simon Reynolds definitely succeeded in his explicit aim of giving me a retroactive high through the rich history of rock with memorable chapters on shoegaze and dream pop... great great account of the reinvention of rock through Reynolds’s own meditations on his life and journey as a music journalist" - - Yağmur, Goodreads
"One of the finest music books of the year" - Jonathan Wright, Classic Pop
"One of the best things about Still in a Dream is the many descriptions of the material conditions under which the music – and Reynolds’ own journalism – came into being…. A small gap exists in time where they can create a life outside the demands of society. There is room to dream, and thus the music also sounded floating and yearning" - Susanne Christensen, Vagant
"Still in a Dream is at times dizzying non-fiction about the most wonderful and dreamy music that was created in the alternative rock era 30–40 years ago.... You also have to dig out old LPs, CDs, seven-inches and maxi singles, not least Youtube videos, to get this music straight into your veins again. Thus, a very inspiring book." - Audun Vinger, DNHelg
"Highly enjoyable blend of memoir, history, anthology. Reynolds never really fails."- Stagger Lee, Goodreads
"A brilliant, bittersweet chronicle of what happens when six-string romanticism finally hits its sonic end of the road and has nowhere left to go but pure noise."- Ilya Miller, Goodreads
"Reynold's prose is as sharp as ever, and his connections to the milieus and awkward network of slackers is heartfelt and never crosses over into sappy territory." - Maldini Damas, Goodreads
"Although with Energy Flash, Rip it up and Start Again, and Shock and Awe he's set impossibly high standards, this might be his masterpiece" - Ingram, Amazon.co.uk
"Simon Reynolds is the kind of music writer who makes you want to rush out and listen to a hundred bands you have either never heard of or heard of / meant to check out / never got round to.... Still in a Dream is as entertaining, informative and combative as a night out with your gig going buddies." - Bookmunch
"Simon Reynolds, you have outdone yourself"- James Marples, Instagram
"A masterwork" ― Neil Mason, Moonbuilding, Book of the Week
"Still in a Dream acts beautifully as a thorough, thoughtful examination of the many featured bands and their music, as an encapsulation of the societies in which they emerged, and as a memoir of the formative years of Reynolds' adult life" -- David Pollock ― Record Collector
"His writing is passionate. . . it's a thrill ride. If you weren't there, you'll wish you had been" - Uncut
"It’s an extraordinarily detailed work, nostalgia for a pre-Internet age. It will be of interest to anybody interested in the music of the period" - No More Workhorse
"Amasterful cultural and social archaeology"- Richard Imrich, Fullmoon
"Pretty good" - Kieran Press-Reynolds, GQ
EDITIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES + COUNTRIES
German translation from Ventil Verlag - December 2026
American publication from Da Capo - January 12, 2027
Spanish translation from Caja Negra Editora - 2027
Chapter by chapter footnotes + bonus material will start going up in February. In the mean time, check out these early posts - The Lost Epigraphs and Lodestar Quotations - and look out for an Auto-Interview in the next month or so.
Chal Ravens has written a lovely in-depth review of Still In A Dream at London Review of Books
There's even an LRBplaylist so you can listen as you read
Kieran Press-Reynolds has a really entertaining survey of the stutter in pop and unpop music, from "K-K-K-Katy" to "Melatonin", 1918 to 2026, over at Pitchfork
I feel like there's loadsa stutter and stammer candidates in ardkore, jungle, 2step...
Perhaps more like the vocal equivalent of facial tics... a Tourettic frenzy
Also footwork, whose GIF-like properties have been noted...
This is probably my favorite bit of rockpop stuttering - "b-b-b-b-baby you ain't seen n-n-n-n-nothing yet"
Used to love this song as a kid... it seemed sweetly, somehow innocently saucy... now as an all growned-up listener I dig that plaintive bit of lead guitar like a bird circling way way up high in the sky
Another classic stutter - digitally addled by Butthole Surfers into a Thai pop song - turning an innocent-in-the-original syllable into a dirty word.
BoC now stirring faint memories of juddering vocal tics on My Life In Bush of Ghosts
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There was a really touching story on the World Service yesterday... told by a woman who has a stutter - stammer, apparently is the more common expression in the U.K. - and as a child went through a lot of anguish, bullying etc - and how, at a particularly low point in her teenage years, when she was feeling suicidal, she heard the Scatman John song, which is all about how he dealt with his own severe stutter, turned it into music, "if I can do, so can you". It pulled her back from the brink.
Conversely, while trawling through ancient episodes of Top of the Pops from the peak Bad Music Era - just unbelievable torrential shite that I never even knew existed, because I didn't have a TV for most of the later Eighties and was out all the time, seeing bands, so rarely saw TOTP - conversely, there is this horrid (s)hit single by Morris Minor & the Majors
And somehow, even though you've been here so many times before, you're never prepared for the way that each week feels deader than the one before.
Until finally it's the last week of August and it's like Time's clock has stopped.
Hang on a minute
I have a powerful sensation of deja vu.
A sicky suspicion that I wrote exactly these words last year.
Or was it the year before?
Well, I suppose that only goes to prove my point, in a way.
But this August... this August has felt deader than ever, no-thanks to the relentless stifling heat, discouraging people from doing anything but sit indoors and sweat.
As our sexton Susan said plaintively the other day, mopping perspiration from her brow as she stepped into the rectory: "has the sky forgotten how to rain?".
The footpaths are cracked and dusty. The grass in the meadows is crisp and brown. The trees have that beat-down sun-struck feeling about them. The birds are silent. Blackberries, ripened prematurely, are already at that bloated, fly-blown stage, too sickly to tempt the rare soul on a stroll across the fields.
Indeed there was some debate about whether this newsletter should be called the Harvest Edition on account of the abnormally early harvest.
"We need rain. On parched soil and souls" - so says Evangelical Focus.
It all brings back memories of the long hot summer of 1976 and the unforgettable events of that year.
I'm talking of course about the village fête - the dispute about the whittling contest, the dead-of-night vandalization of the exhibits display, that shocking brawl on the Castle grounds between Ralph Knapp and Patrick Hearn, culminating in the burly pair tumbling into the moat (thankfully almost completely dried out because of the drought).
Memories of another long ago era waft pungently from the first of this season's offerings (dead it might be in the streets and the fields, but musicians and other creative sorts have been busy).
Memories of the early '80s and local musicians like Dramatisand Pride of Passion - late-arriving prog rockers who adapted with surprising agility to the synthpop era (if not in these cases actually making the charts like other musicians who followed a similar arc, such as Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones).
I speak of the new album by The Belbury Poly - Sorcerer, released on the Ghost Box sister-imprint Belbury Music to indicate its divergence from the label's primary soundstream.
Release irrationale:
At the outset of the project, Jim Jupp assembled a palette of instruments and sounds which evoke a moment in musical history when digital studio technology just started to take over from analogue.
Eschewing Belbury Poly’s earlier mid 70s obsessions, to focus on that period around 1983, when artists who could afford it started to experiment with samplers. It was a musical moment dominated by the sounds of Prophet 5, DX7 & PPG synthesizers, Fairlight & Synclavier music computers, TR808 drum machine & Simmons Drums (those ubiquitous hexagonal drum pads) and of course the much-maligned fretless bass.
It’s also an era that’s now seen as something of a golden age for fantasy, sci-fi, comics, book, TV, movies and games (particularly in Britain where it was often fuelled by a post punk reaction to Thatcher’s regime).
In Jupp’s memory these things go hand in hand; as a child his nerdy fandom was soundtracked not as it was for most by Heavy Metal, but by the electronic pop of Bill Nelson, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan, and Frank Chickens. Also, by otherworldly TV soundtracks & production music of the era: Elizabeth Parker and Paddy Kingsland at the BBC, The Parry Music Library, Rod Argent’s new age library albums and even Clannad’s Robin of Sherwood score.
Also flashing back to the Eighties is the latest release from Fil OK, the final instalment of his "ecclesiastical electronica" trilogy, released under the alter-ego We're in the Water. It's titled The Dome.
No tasters available as yet but to whet your appetite for the kooky chorale of tracks like "Being Eaten" and the final title track, you can check out the previous installments of this 36 song-cycle: The Belltower and The Steeple
Release irrationale:
2026’s three ambitious works have each interpreted the lyrics and music of his new songs literally as architectural spaces, placing them conceptually in these three grand, holy places of worship, celebration and contemplation. Across the past twelve months this musical trilogy has variously explored different facets of the human experience, and The Dome sees Fil delve deep into the universe of spirituality and what lies within its mysterious realms.
Whereas February’s The Steeple explored the mind - how we think, question, imagine and make sense of the world around us - with June’s second long-player The Belltower turning to the body - the reality of living through relationships, joy, struggle and experience – this autumn’s concluding part The Dome completes the trilogy via an exploration of what nourishes the spirit. It's a record all about connection, hope, resilience, compassion, love, and our capacity to keep growing.
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More squarely in the main soundstream of parish activity, a couple of new publications and a podcast series dedicated to all things spectral.
From Reaktion Books, here's a new tome attempting to take the measure of this thing they call hauntology: Jamie Sexton's The Sounds of Lost Futures: British Musical Hauntology by Jamie Sexton (that's the second appearance of that word in this newsletter, and kind of an eerily apt name for a scholar of hauntology to have, since a sexton's responsibilities include funerals, digging graves and keeping cemeteries tidy).
Release irrationale:
Musical hauntology conjures sounds of futures that never arrived: music that reflects on memory and the recent past, drawing on analogue instrumentation, sampling and digital processing to capture how time feels twisted in an age of endless reproduction. The Sounds of Lost Futures offers the first sustained overview of this influential British mode, tracing its emergence, cognate genres and wide constellation of media influences. It also unpacks the conceptual forces that shape it – from nostalgia and retro culture to fractured temporal experience – while covering key artists and labels such as Ghost Box, The Caretaker and Mordant Music. With a dedicated focus on audiovisual hauntology, this book provides new clarity on a musical form attuned to the strange echoes of modern life.
Unconvinced by that "the first sustained overview" claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, and there was also Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia by William Burns. And I I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books .... Not forgetting some jottings by yours truly and the Reverend Fisher. So I would say the soil is well tilled at this point.
Also, “cognate genres”!
A slightly stale air also clings to this non-nonfiction publication: the anthologyBrutalist Ghost Stories.
You simultaneously think "why did no one think of this before?" and "surely someone already did this?"
From Confingo Publishing, a release irrationale:
‘We live among ruins, surrounded by places built for a future that never arrived.’
Brutalist Ghost Stories is an anthology of seventeen original stories inspired by Britain's brutalist buildings and landscapes.
From grand libraries and university buildings to service stations and closed down car parks, this collection explores the concrete structures which have in their own way shaped Britain and imagines what dwells in them.
Traversing Scotland through to the south coast of England, these stories explore haunting, memory, folklore, loss and the uncanny.
Familiar landmarks become sites of mystery, overlooked corners of our nation's built environment reveal hidden histories and strange encounters abound.
Why no story about our local carbuncle, Tonwell Tower?
Clearly this whole field remains a growth area. Viz, the Institute's launch of a special unit, Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group
Ghost stories are in fact one of its subjects of interest:
We can glimpse the gleanings of these researchers through their regular Hauntology Podcast, as amiable and indoor-voice intimate as you'd expect from such a gathering of scholarly kith. It's available via Rephonic, Apple, and other places you might expect, with transcripts offered as well as the audio. Three episodes in, topics include "Spectral Tourism" and "Haunted Writing, Creative Non-Fiction and the Moors Murderers".
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Returning to recent musical emanations...
Well, what a pleasant surprise - a new late-summer release from Moon Wiring Club, an artist I generally associate with the cold, damp weeks leading up to Christmas.
Almost Alive At Morgans Laneis one of Ian Hodgson's irregular delves into auto-archaeology, with a twist: these are not unreleased tracks and alternate takes but live performances, or residues thereof, that have been assembled into a kind of phantasmagoric "live album" that never quite was.
The album is out in a few days time and although a download-only release, it can be acquired in a special package: a "bespoke chunky presentation envelope" containing sundry goodies such as an A6 kineograph "overlaid with fragmented 1985 Microcomputer Soft Command Hallucinations" (yes your guess is as good mine), 8 exclusive postcards, and 4 (out of a range of 40) Curious Quartet Artcards. There are also some other related and semi-related goodies separately available - an Almost Alive Sticker Selection, issue #3 of Catmask , feline greetment cards- but also buyable as a bundle.
Release irrationale:
ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE (GEpH020DLX) is quite possibly the cumulative meisterwerk of MWCs ongoing audio reclamation mission / divine calling to conjure up and deftly assemble as much esoteric ODDNUSS inside the most closely packed, yet luxuriously stacked envelope as possible.
Many moons ago, MWC were coaxed from their ephemeral Northern compound by a variety of elegant individuals and highly professional organisations to lucratively perform aLIVE undertaking within a fascinating variety of fashionably showbiz, yet simultaneously clandestine locations throughout the country.
Naturally these MWC performances were instantly and uniformly proclaimed a MASSIVE SUCCESS and soon became the highly sort-after ticket of the season, spoken of with whispered awe and a wide-eyed reverence.
Who amongst us can ever forget the amusing MWC catchphrase quotations ‘In the Phonebook Under Gas’ or ‘On the Never Never’ that artfully proliferated as a welcome secret fever throughout the en vogue vocabulary of the contemporaneous socialite elite.
Now YOU, who understandably were :
denied entrance
unable to locate the supposed venue
not yet sentient
choosing instead to rewatch repeats of Lovejoy
erroneously duped by pernicious rumours viciously perpetrated by the stealth agents of our envious rivals into avoidance
flamboyantly overdosed on Opium derivatives during the proceedings
Can rectify this catastrophic oversight + finally fully submit to Hexperience MWC ALMOST ALIVE AT MORGANS LANE with this highly stylish and unique bespoke chunky presentation envelope ~ jam-packed with HAND-ASSEMBLED interactive mnemonic articles all adeptly infused with occult significance potentiality.
8 tracks of unreleased MWC Musick(e) have been assiduously exhumed and thoughtfully re-spliced from an arcane assimilation-jumble transfer of aLIVE locationals, sound-bored recordings, reassembled rehearsal footage, in situ bootlegs, digital camera memory cards + patented MWC test recovery CDR Disc Rot Technique.
An undeniable RUFFness alongside an omnipresent atmosphere of uncanny malevolence eerily permeate these recordings, which feature aLIVE baked-in beat loopery elaborately juggled with copious quantities of unmoored vocal exclamations, percolated with corroded roomtone reverberations and myriad splintering aberrative atmospheric fluctuations.
Familiar MWC favourites such as Doll Hill House & Tudorbethan Jobbernowl now feature mutating situation deformities, alongside never repeated MWC obscurities such as the distorted machinations of Black Pudding Jacking Zone and the sublime Seance Psychedelia offering Sherry at the Ritz ~ all considerately rescued from the Vault ov ‘Orror by dedicated + discerning MWC archivists for the eternal delectation of future generations.
The resulting 55 minute opus provides a definitive aural totality of what undeniably conceivably occurred when MWC manifested one last time and performed their infamous Psychotopographical Swansong
And it's another splendid splodge of oozy-woozy oddnuss... simultaneously disintegrative and driving (the show must go on even if chunks of flesh are flaking off the performers)..... schmears of scrambled sound veer out of the foggy mix like a drunkenly jeering stranger... melody-riffs and refrains naggingly familiar from the MWC songbook return in distended form like hall-of-mirrors reflections of friend-faces... Top tune: the tauntingly jaunty "Tudorbethan Jobbernowl (Ergotoxicosis Mix)".
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Sunday school director Dave Howell informs me that the new record by Lawrence English, who hails from our Australian twin town Woolloongabba, is definitely on the vibe: sonically "somewhere between Vangelis and The Caretaker" and carrying a polemic about "the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures."
English's release irrationale refers to a term he's coined, "Acid Nostalgia... a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flattened rendering of the preceding times... a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail."
The album's title is certainly bang on theme: The Rest Is My Ghost.
Mr. Howell incidentally directs us to a new track by Ukrainian exchange student Regina Collage that if not exactly haunty does waft off halcyon echoes of A.R. Kane - "It Should Be Something".
Gorgeous stuff, definite "Up!" vibrations.... From the album Horizont. It's on Jabu's label do you have peace?
(Jabu themselves return shortly with a wonderfully atmospheric and spacey-sounding EP, Severn Flood Plain / Where You Run To on Mr. Howell's label Six of Swords)
It pops up in the cover story on Space Afrika, whose new albumQuiet Storm is out at the end of September.
And it pops up again in the lead review for an artist unfamiliar to me: Conflux Coldwell. The album is called Echolalia and it explores the connections between hauntology and autism.
Release irrationale:
"There is a spectre haunting Conflux Coldwell, the spectre of autism."
Bulletdodge is proud to announce the release of Echolalia a striking new electronica album from Conflux Coldwell. Arriving digitally this June, with a vinyl edition to follow in early September, the album Echolalia explores the notion of internal “ghosts” — the lingering traces that inhabit the mind. Sparked by his daughter’s autism diagnosis earlier this year, and his sister’s AuDHD diagnosis the year before, Coldwell was prompted to reflect on his own neurodivergence. The result is a deeply personal and introspective work that interrogates how these experiences have shaped his creative process, his unique perception of the world, and his enduring fascination with machines and hauntology.
Also lead reviewed in that same issue of The Wire is a record that truly can only be described as bringing-up-the-rear when it come to its subject: the spookiness of children's TV of the British 1960s and 1970s: Luke Haines's Izzy Wizzy Let's Get Busy.
"By the 1960s and 70s magick was all over children's television in the UK..."
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Not precisely hauntological but hailing from our Canadian twin town of Port Moody, Realm of Dusk - the new-ish alias of Sam Macklin - have recently put out a third album of spacey glitchscapes. It's titled, logically enough, III and is released on the evocatively named imprint Blasted Gorse.
If a title like "Astral Vomit" suggests a secret and hitherto unexpected arsequake influence, others such as "Bill Evans" and "Solitude Seekers" more closely evoke the atmosphere. Indeed Matthew Ingram, reviewing at Woebot, uses words like "pensive" and "sidereal" and "funereal". Which last does sound a wee bit haunty.
Another elder of the parish swings by with news of an Extended Play.
Kollidaskope is a hot slab of Ekoplekz homing - or honing - in with laser-precise focus on the exact set of sounds that tickle his audio-erogenous zones. Sensibility refinement as a lifetime's project.
So the opening title track is Rastakraut fastskank, like a dried-up Monolake. Dank 'n' bouncy, "Refrakzion" is like "dub techno" if it meant something completely different. "Dubnauzium" finds the sour spot between "Silent Command" and "The Gospel Comes to New Guinea". "Autoekpression" is Bandalu chasing "Bitches Brew" down a long dark tunnel.
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Overtaken by meteorological events! In between starting the Newsletter last weekend and finishing up this morning, well, the sky remembered how to rain. Susan, the sexton, popped by the rectory on her way back from the shops - her face streaming with moisture, only this time precipitation not perspiration. Drenched to the skin she was and shivering, thanks to the sudden cataclysmic downpour and temperature drop. Dripping all over the freshly waxed parquet flooring.
Answering the prayers of farmers and gardeners alike, the heavens have finally opened up.
