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? 

mixing it up with Matos

I had a ton of fun talking with Michaelangelo Matos for his substack Beat Connection - about Futuromania, electronic music, radio, my other books - with  the chat structured around five deejay mixes,  as that is Beat Connection's focus. The selection was bookended by two Radio One classics: John Peel's legendary Punk Special from December '76, Rustie's Essential Mix of April 2012. From back-to-barebones rock 'n'roll  to maxed-out neo-prog digi-dance. 

Along the way, I got reintroduced to these old favorites: UK garage from before either "speed" or  "2step" kicked in, which I first heard via another of Matos's selections: Tuff Jam's Underground Frequencies Volume One. 

Matos noticed that one of Basement Jaxx had some involvement in that gorgeous, gorgeous Mutiny track. 

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. 

frozen futures and final sicknesses (see you in 2018)

 

On news stands now, the latest issue of  The Wire contains a long review by me pairing the comeback album by Marc Acardipane a/k.a The Mover with  Sick Music 2018, a compilation of contemporary drum + bass on the Hospital label that I surprised myself by enjoying much more than I'd expected.  As well as an enthused review of two fine records, the piece is an investigation of  the fate of vanguard genres (in this case, gloomcore gabba and D+B) when their accelerationist drive stabilises into a steady state.





The Mover - Undetected Act from the Gloom Chamber.

Also in the April issue, a reet treet for all nuumologists: Michaelangelo Matos's Primer to Pirate Radio Deejay Sets. He's done a fine job laying out the evolution from circa 1989 through to the post-dubstep diaspora and his forensic sifting through the messy mass of archival tapes deposited online by old skool fans has uncovered a trove of true gems. This is probably my favorite of the Matos selections that I've so far checked out.



Finally, in case you missed it, I recently uploaded the best of my own stash of pirate tapes, which I'd digitized some years ago but never got around to turning into YouTube clips.