The blogscene seems more dormant than it's ever been. Heartening, then, to see a burst of discursive energy over at Aloysius, breaking a long silence with a model display of close listening. In this case, listening to "banging unintelligent techno" by The Advent and Joey Beltram (highlighting JB's "ear for choosing sounds with strong phonetic properties"), Model 500's Deep Space ("science fiction as it seemed when I was a kid: not cheesy and man-childish, but mysterious, vast, and wise"), Francois Bayle's Grande Polyphonie ("a series of sound-character studies.... a comprehensible chaos"), and Baby Ford & Ian B's "Dead Eye" ("submersion in complete darkness... awed apprehensiveness of moving forward through an unknown and dangerous-seeming environment").
Aloysius's post ends, incidentally, with one of the best "bloggaz 4 life" sign-offs ever.
Over here, things have been quiet too - I have a heap of posts waiting to be written up, but been busy with various developments.
Most substantial of recent postige is this Hardly Baked 2 megasplat on the nexus of late glam, prog and incipient New Wave, which started with me stumbling on a Split Enz promo which is mindblowingly godawful except for about 30 seconds in the middle when it's mindblowing, and then swelled into a sprawling video and jpeg-illustrated tour of similar cusp-straddling middle-Seventies monstrosities. Indeed, I keep adding new clips 'n' pix 'n' dollops of data.
At Energy Flash, I also look into an unlikely source of the words "rave" and "raver" in the Brit Sixties.
But here at the hub blog, it's mostly been a grim, endless procession of RIPs. Perhaps I should just go ahead and rename it Griefblog...
A couple of extracurricular activities:
In Taiwan last month I did an interview with Brian Hioe and Florence Yi-Hsun Huang for the webzine No Man Is An Island, which is connected to a publication called New Bloom - touching mostly on ideas related to Energy Flash and Retromania as well as the politics of music in general, my career to date, etc.
Just out now is a new installment of Sombrero Fallout, a podcast created by Ian Forth, an old college associate and early contributor to Margin, the zine that preceded Monitor. This episode features me chatting with Ian about a bunch of my favorite records, from Ian Dury and the Slits via Jan Garbarek and World Domination Enterprises to Migos and June Tabor.