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."

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

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 

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

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? 

Departing Pitchfork editor Mark Richardson signs off with the final edition of his long-running Resonant Frequency column - a meditation about sound-cocooning, listening-in-motion, and silence.

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

Never was that big a fan of the "walk" bit in Walkman - I like to hear the sounds of the city, or Nature, not be sealed off or shielded from them. But I have enjoyed static outdoor listening (the beach - one vivid memory to match Mark's many examples would be listening to "Gesture Without Motion" by Neil Trix by the shore of Shelter Island). And I do love cocooned-listening while travelling, particularly trains and planes.

One problem with this private-yet-public listening, though, is that you can be so immersively  wrapped up in / rapt by the music, so affected, that some kind of physical response is demanded.  A facial expression, a gesture, a flourish of "air" instrumentation - guitar lick, drum roll - or some kind of sitting-down-version of dancing.  Perhaps even singing along or an MC / ad lib style outburst. But you are surrounded on all sides by strangers!  You can either allow yourself to be inhibited by their presence and listen in this sort of "internally turbulent", externally impassive, expressionless / motionless way -  which is  frustrating, possibly unhealthy even. Or you can go "fuck it, it's highly unlikely I will ever see any of these fellow passengers again" and allow yourself the odd physically demonstrative  reaction to the sonic peak experiences you are undergoing. Increasingly, I find myself going for the second of these options. This is a roundabout way of apologising to anybody who has ever sat in my vicinity on a train or a plane.